Full ADOPT Grant: Round 1

Lead organisation

To lead a project you 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
• collaborate with at least one other farming or growing businesses of any size, based in the UK

It is desirable that you also collaborate with other UK registered organisations.

More information on the different types of organisation can be found in our Funding rules.

Academic institutions cannot lead.

Project team

To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be a farmer, grower or forester based in the UK.

You may also collaborate if you are a UK registered:

• business of any size
• academic institution
• charity
• not for profit
• public sector organisation
• research organisations
• research and technology organisation (RTO)

Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service (IFS) by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once partners have accepted the invitation, they will be asked to login or to create an account in IFS. They are responsible for entering their own project costs in the application.

To be an eligible collaboration, the lead and at least one other organisation must apply for funding when entering their costs into the application.

Subcontractors

Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.

Subcontractors can be from anywhere in the UK and you must select them through your usual procurement process.

You can use subcontractors from overseas but must make the case in your application as to why you cannot use subcontractors from the UK.

You must provide a detailed rationale, evidence of the potential UK contractors you approached and the reasons why they were unable to work with you. We will not accept a cheaper cost as a sufficient reason to use an overseas subcontractor.

All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total project costs.

We welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and are committed to making our application process accessible to everyone. This includes making reasonable adjustments, for people who have a disability or a long-term condition and face barriers applying to us.

We recommend you contact us at least 15 working days before this competition’s closing date to allow us to put the most suitable support in place. The support we can provide may be limited if you contact us close to the competition deadline.

You can contact Innovate UK by email or call 0300 321 4357. Our phone lines are open from 9am to 12pm and 2pm to 5pm UK time, Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays).

If you have any enquiries about the ADOPT funding opportunity please contact the ADOPT Support HUB. Email: adoptsupport@adas.co.uk or call 0800 987 8006. The Support Hub line is open from 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday.

Your project must:

• have total costs between £50,000 and £100,000
• last between 6 and 24 months
• start by 1 November 2025
• end by 31 October 2027
• intend to exploit the results from or in England
• carry out all of its project work in the UK
• embrace open innovation principles and be willing to share results with other farmers, growers or foresters
• have a Project Facilitator as part of the project team who is listed in the ADOPT Innovate UK Business Connect database

Projects must always start on the first of the month, even if this is a non-working day. You must not start your project until your Grant Offer Letter has been approved by Innovate UK. Any delays within Project Setup may mean we need to delay your project start date.

You must only include eligible project costs in your application. For specific guidance, see the eligibility section in this competition.

The aim of this competition is to support innovative on-farm trials or experiments to test ideas or solutions and demonstrate that they will address major on-farm or immediate post farmgate challenges or opportunities.

Your project must have the potential to significantly improve one or more of:

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

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

You must demonstrate to other English farmers, growers or foresters how the project will benefit them.

You must outline how you will communicate and share the outputs from your trial or experiment during and after your project.

Portfolio approach

We aim to fund a variety of projects across different technologies, markets and technological maturities. We call this a portfolio approach.

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

• agriculture
• horticulture
• agro-forestry

An online briefing event was held on 10 April. You can view the recording and download the slides from this event.

The ADOPT Support Hub, run by ADAS, has been commissioned to work on ADOPT and they can support applicants and funded projects throughout their journey.