AgriScale: Accelerating agri-tech manufacturing competition briefing

About the event

Agri-tech is identified as a frontier industry in the UK Government’s Modern Industrial Strategy, Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan, aligning closely with national goals around innovation, sustainability, and economic growth.

Automation and robotic systems are seen as key solutions to overcome the challenges in agriculture related to skilled labour shortages and the need for improved food security that can be enabled through enhanced productivity, profitability, sustainability, and resilience.

Over half a billion of Agri-tech R&D funding has been deployed in the last decade with significant progress made in new technologies, including practical automation and robotic solutions to tackle these challenges. Despite the development of highly innovative solutions, significant challenges remain.

Some products still demonstrate specific operational, performance or reliability technology gaps meaning that their readiness for adoption and for commercial end user acceptance remains low.

In some cases, whilst products are near fully developed and ready for end user adoption, there is need for scaling in both business and manufacturing processes. This is to ensure these innovations can be reliably manufactured and supported at scale to reach the market, with businesses becoming viable.

Purpose of competition briefing

During this briefing webinar, we will focus on the upcoming AgriScale funding competition which aims to fund succinct, focused projects to:

• specifically address these technology gaps and to accelerate and de-risk the late-stage development and validation of solutions to demonstrate performance and reliability acceptable to commercial end users
• to accelerate and de-risk the transition to manufacture and distribution at scale, through design for manufacture and manufacturing process optimisation, and through development of supply chain and procurement strategies

Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will invest up to £13 million in these AgriScale competitions. AgriScale is not intended to fund development of early or mid-stage technologies or concepts.

The funding available is in two separate strands, both closing 3 June 2026:

• Industrial Research – projects with costs of £250k-£750k and duration 6-12 months; projects should aim to close technology gaps that prevent products being proven, demonstrated and accepted in end user conditions.
• Experimental Development – projects with costs of £1m-£3m and duration 6-18 months; projects should target getting products to market to accelerate end user adoption.