Farming Innovation Programme: Feasibility Round 5

Who Can Apply

The project must be led by a UK-registered business of any size, including a sole trader or partnership. The lead must be able to demonstrate that it is an established commercial business. The lead organisation must collaborate with other UK-registered organisations and involve at least one other grant-claiming business.

Eligible collaborators can include:

• Businesses of any size
• Academic institutions
• Charities
• Not-for-profit organisations
• Public sector organisations
• Research and technology organisations

Academic institutions cannot lead or apply alone. Charities, Community Interest Companies, and other organisations without a commercial focus cannot lead.

Funding Requirements

The level of funding available depends on the organisation’s size and role in the project.

For commercial feasibility activities:

• Micro and small organisations can receive up to 70% of eligible costs
• Medium-sized organisations can receive up to 60%
• Large organisations can receive up to 50%

The remaining project costs must be provided by the participating organisations.

Where farmers, growers, or foresters request grant funding, at least 50% of that requested grant must be allocated to farmers, growers, or foresters based in England.

Research organisations undertaking non-economic activity can collectively account for up to 50% of the total eligible project costs. Academic institutions can receive 80% of full economic costs, while eligible RTOs, charities, public sector bodies, and research organisations may receive up to 100% of their eligible non-economic costs.

Why This Competition Matters

Farmers, growers, and foresters are under growing pressure to improve productivity while reducing environmental impacts, managing climate risks, and responding to changing market conditions.

Many promising agricultural technologies fail to progress because businesses lack the evidence needed to prove technical feasibility, farmer value, and commercial potential. This competition helps bridge that gap by funding collaborative studies that test whether an innovation can work in commercially relevant settings.

For successful applicants, the programme can provide the evidence, partnerships, and technical understanding needed to progress towards larger-scale R&D, field trials, private investment, and market adoption.

How Inventya Can Help

A strong application must show that the proposed innovation addresses a genuine industry problem, delivers clear benefits to farmers, growers, or foresters, and can be developed through a credible collaborative feasibility project. Inventya can support applicants in building a well-structured proposal that brings together the technical, commercial, and agricultural case.

Our support includes:

• Eligibility and scope assessment – Reviewing the project, consortium, costs, and planned activities to confirm alignment with the competition rules and identify any eligibility risks before submission.
• Consortium development – Helping applicants identify the right mix of businesses, farmers, growers, foresters, research organisations, and technical partners, while defining clear responsibilities and a strong rationale for collaboration.
• Problem and market validation – Strengthening the evidence for the agricultural challenge, demonstrating the scale of the need, and showing why the proposed solution is relevant to commercially operating farmers and land-based businesses.
• Technical proposal development – Turning complex scientific or engineering ideas into a clear feasibility plan with well-defined objectives, methods, work packages, milestones, and measurable outputs.
• Farmer benefit and adoption planning – Explaining how the innovation will improve productivity, sustainability, resilience, or emissions performance and how it could be adopted in real farming or post-farmgate environments.  
• Commercialisation strategy – Developing the future business model, customer proposition, route to market, intellectual property position, and follow-on development pathway.
• Budget and funding support – Preparing a compliant project budget, checking funding rates, allocating partner costs, and ensuring that all expenditure is eligible and properly justified.
• Risk, impact, and value-for-money development – Identifying technical, commercial, regulatory, and adoption risks while demonstrating why the project represents a strong use of public funding.
• Full application review – Reviewing the complete proposal against Innovate UK’s assessment criteria to improve clarity, consistency, persuasiveness, and scoring potential.

innovation programmes, Inventya helps agricultural innovators turn early-stage concepts into credible, collaborative projects with a clear pathway towards future development and commercial adoption.