To apply for this grant your organisation must:

• be an active farming, growing or forestry business of any size based in England
• be able to evidence that you are an established commercial business, including sole traders and partnerships
• have a UK bank account

Organisations that are not profit driven or do not have a commercial focus, including Community Interest Companies (CICs) and charities, are not allowed to participate in this competition.

To be eligible to apply for this competition, you must:

• engage with an external Project Facilitator who is registered in the Innovate UK Business Connect database
• work with the facilitator to develop and submit an eligible application for a Full ADOPT Grant competition
• add £2500 in the ‘other costs’ column in the finance section of the application form

If you are successful in this competition you will need to:

• provide evidence that your Full ADOPT Grant application has been sent for assessment
• submit a claim within three months of receiving your Grant Offer letter (GOL)

A total of £2,500 will be awarded per successful participant once the claim and evidence is submitted.

This competition is designed for farmers, growers and foresters based in England who are keen to test and trial new ideas or solutions on-farm and require support to develop a Full ADOPT Grant application.

The aim of this competition is to:

• provide a £2,500 grant for a farmer, grower or forester based in England to engage an external Project Facilitator to support with submissions into the Full ADOPT Grant competitions
• improve the quality of Full ADOPT Grant applications
• make ADOPT funding accessible to a wider range of applicants
• enhance the skills and expertise of the farming eco-system to engage with innovation funding

The project you intend to develop and submit as a Full ADOPT Grant application must be for an on-farm trial or experiment to test new ideas and solutions. This is to demonstrate to you and other farmers, growers or foresters if it works in real on-farm conditions.

Your project will need to address major on-farm or immediate post farmgate challenges or opportunities and it must have the potential to significantly improve one or more of the following:

• productivity
• resilience
• sustainability and progression towards net zero farming

Your proposal must demonstrate to other farmers, growers or foresters in England how the idea or solution will be of benefit to them.

Your project must focus on testing and trialling ideas or solutions that are either new or not yet widely used.

Your project must address a significant industry challenge or opportunity in at least one or more of the following sectors:

• agriculture
• horticulture
• agro-forestry

We are not funding projects that:

• do not benefit farmers, growers or foresters in England
• are based on funded crop variety plot trials
• are based on existing demonstration trials or projects
• are for the production of crops or plants for medicinal or pharmaceutical use
• are for cultivated meat
• are based on equine systems
• involve wild caught fisheries
• involve aquaculture, such as algae and seaweed for human consumption
• involve fermentation systems for bacteria, yeast or fungi for human consumption

Recorded briefings on scope and process are available: watch the scope recording and watch the process recording

Note: the recordings are both applicable to this round 9 competition but state round 2 within the context of the recordings.

If you want help finding a Project Facilitator, visit the Innovate UK Business Connect Project Facilitator database.

If you have further queries, you can also contact Innovate UK Business Connect’s Agrifood team.