Farmed animal and aquaculture SPARK Award winners announced

Innovate UK Business Connect has announced the 10 winners of the farmed animal and aquaculture SPARK Awards, each receiving up to £20k each for their project. Each Award will facilitate a new collaboration between business and academia and enable the delivery of innovative solutions aimed to accelerate the development of new products, processes, or services for the farmed animal or aquaculture sectors.

The projects, which started in February 2026 and will run to November 2026, focus on improving challenging areas within the farmed animal and aquaculture supply chains, including animal health, nutrition, and precision farming applications.

They span upcycling poultry waste into sustainable protein for aquaculture feed, detecting welfare poultry welfare issues to improve production, monitoring calf health and stress levels, and evaluating a sustainable seaweed-based feed ingredient.

Winning projects accelerating the development of Agrifood in the UK

The projects are focused on the following innovations:

• Upcycling poultry waste into sustainable protein ingredients for aquaculture feed (Project Partners: Advanced Food Innovation Centre, Sheffield Hallam University and Kera Protein Ltd (Kera))
• Early detection of welfare issues impacting production in poultry (Project Partners: University of Surrey and AviaSenze Ltd)
• LANO-SHRIMP: Lanolin as a functional feed additive for shrimp aquaculture (Project Partners: Swansea University and LanoTech Ltd)
• Precision calf health and stress monitoring (Project Partners: University of Reading and Cambridge Animal Technologies Ltd, trading as Smartbell)
• IN-CH4RGE: Identifying novel biomarkers for CH4-regulating gene expression (Project Partners: University of Reading and Antler Bio Ltd)
• Evaluation of a novel seaweed-based functional high-protein feed and its sustainable production process (Project Partners: Biorenewables Development Centre and MariCura Ltd)
• Solving larval production for UK shellfish aquaculture using phages (Project Partners: University of Glasgow and Esox Biologics)
• Non-invasive diagnostics for oyster hatchery production (Project Partners: The University of St Andrews and NativeAqua Ltd)
• Ovation Agriculture (Project Partners: University of Glasgow and Ovation Agriculture)
• Development of a water treatment system for artemia culture to remove residual feed and waste (Project Partners: Swansea University and Aquanzo)

Discover more about each project in our projects download.

Get in touch

To connect with a project partner, please contact one of our experts or email the team on agrifood@iukbc.org.uk.