The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has opened a £20 million competition for collaborative automation and robotics projects in agriculture, horticulture, and forestry. The second round of the Farming Futures Automation and Robotics competition is being delivered with Innovate UK and will accept applications until 11am on 30 September 2026.
Projects must have eligible costs of between £500,000 and £2.5 million, run for 12 to 36 months, and begin by 1 March 2027. A UK-registered business must lead each application and collaborate with at least one other eligible organisation. Funded work must be carried out principally in the UK, with results intended for exploitation here.
Every proposal must demonstrate a direct benefit for farmers or growers in England. The competition covers robotic and intelligent automated machinery, imaging and sensing systems, monitoring equipment, and software that turns collected data into management decisions or automated actions.
Eligible work also includes automation for crop preparation, packing, storage, and supply chain activity conducted on farms or immediately after the farm gate. Intelligent systems for food storage and energy management are included, provided the application remains tied to agricultural, horticultural, or forestry production. Food processing and manufacturing projects are excluded.
Forestry applications can cover tree nurseries, planting, woodland monitoring, and woodland management systems. Heavy harvesting equipment and forestry harvesting operations fall outside the competition. Automation must also be central to the proposed innovation rather than a supporting feature attached to another product.
Defra wants projects to improve productivity, resource efficiency, food quality, traceability, waste management, crop and animal health, welfare, sustainability, and resilience. Reducing dependence on seasonal labour is another explicit objective, particularly where automation offers a credible alternative for repetitive, physically demanding, or difficult-to-staff work.
Funding intensity will depend on the size of the participating organisation. Industrial research can receive up to 70% of eligible costs for micro and small businesses, 60% for medium-sized businesses, and 50% for large companies. Research organisations undertaking non-economic activity can account for up to 30% of the total eligible project costs.
No single partner may represent more than 70% of a collaboration’s eligible costs. The rule should encourage projects that connect equipment developers and researchers with farms, growers, or forestry operators capable of testing whether the technology performs outside a controlled development environment.
Earlier awards show the practical scope expected from applicants. A 2023 project received £786,220 to develop an open-source vineyard mapping platform using drones and robotic technology, while a robotic mushroom harvesting programme received £772,425 to combine bed scanning, soft gripping, stem trimming, and commercial operation.
The latest call follows other publicly backed programmes aimed at transferring automation into working agricultural environments, including a four-year farm robotics project involving Forth UK. Farms present a more variable engineering environment than conventional production cells: terrain changes, crops are inconsistent, weather affects sensing and traction, and equipment must operate safely around people, animals, and existing machinery.
A robot that completes a task during a controlled demonstration can still fail commercially if cleaning, maintenance, charging, tool changes, software support, or seasonal utilisation are not addressed. Field reliability and service requirements will therefore carry as much weight as individual demonstrations of perception, navigation, or manipulation.
The £500,000 minimum project size favours substantial collaborative programmes rather than small feasibility studies. Applicants will need to define measurable improvements in labour use, throughput, yield, energy consumption, chemical application, waste, or another operating result. Commercial potential will depend on whether those gains justify acquisition, training, maintenance, and downtime costs.
Deployment economics will differ sharply between agricultural sectors. High-value horticultural crops and repetitive indoor operations may support specialised automation earlier than extensive tasks performed during a short seasonal window. Leasing, contracting, shared ownership, and robotics-as-a-service models may be necessary where individual farms cannot keep expensive machinery sufficiently utilised.
The programme also requires applicants to describe environmental and societal effects, provide sustainability measures, and guard against negative consequences. Innovate UK intends to fund a portfolio spanning different technologies, markets, and levels of maturity rather than concentrating the entire allocation on one type of machine.
Experience from similar competitions suggests applicants may face a success rate of about 35%, and the £20 million allocation remains subject to enough high-quality proposals being received. Attractive prototypes will not be sufficient. The stronger bids will combine a defined agricultural problem, credible engineering, a workable manufacturing route, and evidence that the resulting system can remain supported after public funding ends.
Applications close on 30 September, with successful projects expected to begin by March 2027. The useful measure will emerge later: not how many machines reach a demonstration field, but how many survive full production cycles and progress into repeatable manufacture.
