Farming Innovation Programme Feasibility Round Five: A £15 Million Defra and Innovate UK Competition Funding Collaborative Agri-Innovation Studies of £200,000 to £500,000 — Closing 9 September 2026

Farming Innovation Programme Feasibility Round Five: A £15 Million Defra and Innovate UK Competition Funding Collaborative Agri-Innovation Studies of £200,000 to £500,000 — Closing 9 September 2026

Most agricultural innovation dies in the gap between “this looks promising in a research paper” and “we know enough to build it.” Feasibility Round Five of the Farming Innovation Programme exists to fund exactly that gap. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs will put up to £15 million into projects that spend twelve to twenty-four months answering the question of whether an early-stage idea can actually work on a commercial farm — and Innovate UK runs the competition.

This is not a competition for polished, near-market products. It is for solutions that are still early enough to be genuinely uncertain, but concrete enough that a structured study will produce a defensible answer. Applications close at 11:00am UK time on Wednesday 9 September 2026, and the competition has been open since 15 July 2026.

Key details

What the money is for

The stated aim is to fund feasibility studies investigating new solutions to major on-farm or immediate post-farmgate challenges and opportunities. Three things must be true of your solution: it must significantly improve productivity, it must significantly improve resilience, and it must improve sustainability and progression towards low-emission farming. Those three are listed together, not as alternatives.

There is also a geographic condition that catches a surprising number of applicants off guard. Your proposal must demonstrate how the project will benefit farmers, growers or foresters in England. The lead and partners can be registered anywhere in the UK — the benefit must land in England. Separately, if farmers, growers or foresters in your consortium are claiming grant, a minimum of 50% of the amount they request must go to those geographically based in England.

Your project must address a significant industry challenge or opportunity in at least one of four subsectors:

• Farmed animals
• Plants
• Novel food production systems
• Bioeconomy and agroforestry

Innovate UK applies what it calls a portfolio approach here: it deliberately wants to fund a spread of technologies, markets, themes and locations. In practice this means a high-scoring application can still miss out because three similar projects scored slightly higher, and it means an unusual, well-argued project in an under-represented subsector has a structural advantage that raw score alone does not capture.

What is explicitly out of scope

The exclusion list for this round is unusually specific, and reading it carefully will save some teams weeks of wasted drafting. Defra and Innovate UK will not fund projects that:

• Do not benefit farmers, growers or foresters in England
• Are equine specific
• Involve wild caught fisheries
• Involve aquaculture for fish production or human consumption
• Involve cellular expression of proteins or cultivated meat
• Involve acellular production systems, fermentation systems, bacteria, yeast or fungi for human consumption
• Are for the production of crops or plants for medicinal or pharmaceutical use

There are also two subsidy-driven exclusions: projects cannot be dependent on export performance, and cannot be dependent on domestic inputs usage. If your project fails the scope test, it will not be sent for assessment at all — you will be told why, but you will not get scores or assessor feedback.

Note the shape of the fermentation exclusion. It is bounded by human consumption. A precision-fermentation process aimed at an animal feed input or a soil amendment is not obviously excluded in the way a novel human protein would be, but this is precisely the kind of boundary question worth putting to the Innovate UK customer support team well before the deadline rather than gambling a submission on your own reading.

Who can apply, and who cannot lead

This competition is open to collaborations only. There is no route for a single organisation to apply alone.

To lead, your organisation must be a UK business of any size — including sole traders and partnerships — that can evidence it is an established commercial business, must collaborate with other UK registered organisations, and must involve at least one other grant-claiming business of any size. Academic institutions cannot lead or work alone. Organisations that are not profit driven or lack a commercial focus, including Community Interest Companies and charities, are not allowed to lead in this competition, though they are welcome as partners.

Eligible collaborators are UK registered businesses of any size, academic institutions, charities, not-for-profits, public sector organisations and research and technology organisations. Farming, growing or forestry businesses claiming grant must evidence that they are established commercial businesses and hold a UK bank account.

Two structural rules shape consortium design. First, no single partner may account for more than 70% of total eligible costs — so a lead business cannot treat partners as decorative. Second, both the lead and at least one other organisation must actually apply for funding when entering costs; a consortium where everyone but the lead is unfunded is not an eligible collaboration.

Non-funded partners are permitted and can include UK, EU and other non-UK organisations, carrying out work from their home countries and exploiting results outside the UK. Their costs still count towards total eligible project costs, which matters when you are trying to land inside the £200,000 to £500,000 band.

On application volume: a business can lead on only one application but may be included as a collaborator in two further applications. Further lead applications from the same organisation will be made ineligible. A business not leading anything can collaborate on any number of applications, and all other organisation types can collaborate freely.

How the money is split

Feasibility study intervention rates depend on organisation size. Micro and small organisations can claim up to 70% of eligible project costs, medium organisations up to 60%, and large organisations up to 50%. The balance must be funded by the organisation receiving the grant — this is match funding you need to have, not aspire to.

Research organisations undertaking non-economic activity can collectively share up to 50% of total eligible project costs. Within that ceiling, RTOs, charities, not-for-profits, public sector organisations and research organisations can claim 100% of eligible costs, while academic institutions claim 80% of full economic cost. Academics must now use the Transparent Approach to Costing method and upload it to IFS; the Je-S form has been decommissioned. On IFS, academic partners enter only the 80% being claimed.

Awards to primary agricultural producers that pass technical assessment are subject to the green box exemption under the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, which requires minimal to no trade distortion. All funding sits under the Subsidy Control Act 2022, and is classified as a subsidy that does not count against your Minimal Financial Assistance or de minimis allowance — useful if you are close to that ceiling from other schemes.

The application and how it is scored

The application has three parts: project details, application questions, and finances. Project details covers your team, application details, research category, a 400-word project summary, a 400-word public description that will be published if you win, and a 400-word scope statement. None of it is scored, but the scope statement is the gate that decides whether assessors ever see your proposal.

Questions 1 to 7 are unscored administrative questions covering applicant location, farmer/grower/forester locations for subsidy control, animal testing, permits and licences, international collaboration, export licences, and Trusted Research and Innovation.

The scored questions carry markedly uneven weight, and this is the single most useful thing to internalise before drafting:

Need, approach and market awareness together carry 52 of the 100 points. Teams routinely over-invest in project management and risk registers — worth four points each — while under-serving market awareness, which is worth four times as much.

Every scored answer is capped at 400 words. Four questions take appendices: optional two-page PDFs for Question 9 (diagrams and charts) and Question 10 (team summary), and mandatory two-page PDFs for Question 15 (project plan or Gantt chart) and Question 16 (risk register). Each must be under 10MB and legible at 100% zoom.

You must not include website addresses or URLs in any answer — they will not be opened. Five independent assessors review each application, and all their scores count towards the funding decision.

Timeline

• 15 July 2026, 9:30am — competition opens
• 20 July 2026 — pre-recorded applicant briefing published; briefing slides available in the supporting information section
• 9 September 2026, 11:00am UK time — competition closes
• 12 October 2026 — applicants notified
• 1 January 2027 — projects must start by this date
• 31 December 2028 — projects must end by this date

Projects must always start on the first of a month, even if that is a non-working day, and you must not start before your Grant Offer Letter is approved. Delays in project setup can push your start date back, which compresses your delivery window against the fixed December 2028 end.

Preparing a competitive application

Start with the England benefit, not the technology. Question 8 is worth a fifth of the total score and explicitly asks how your outputs benefit farmers, growers or foresters in England while helping the industry transition to net zero. Vague gestures at national productivity will not carry it. Name the farm systems, the acreage or herd sizes, the regions, and the specific inefficiency you are attacking.

Treat market awareness as a research task. Question 11 asks for market size backed by references, structure and dynamics, customer segmentation, growth rates within clear timeframes, supply chains, business models and barriers to entry. Sixteen points sit here. If your innovation is genuinely novel and the market is unexplored, the question explicitly allows you to say so — but you must then explain how the project will probe the market’s potential, which is itself a work package you should be costing.

Get farmers into the project properly. Question 10 asks how you will work with farmers, growers or foresters throughout the project so that outputs stay anchored to end-user needs. A named farm partner with a defined role in the work packages reads very differently from a letter of interest.

Build the consortium around the 70% rule early. Cost allocation constrains who can do what. Working out late that your lead is carrying 78% of costs forces a redesign of work packages in the final fortnight.

Answer Question 17 honestly. Added value is worth eight points and asks what your project would look like without public funding, and what other investment routes you tried and why they were unsuitable. “We would not do it at all” is a legitimate and often strong answer for a genuinely risky feasibility study — but it needs supporting reasoning about risk profile and investor appetite, not just assertion.

Common mistakes

Submitting a project that is really an industrial research or experimental development proposal dressed as a feasibility study is a frequent failure. Feasibility studies are defined in Innovate UK’s guidance on categories of research; if your work plan is largely building and refining a known solution rather than establishing whether an uncertain one is viable, you are in the wrong competition.

Other recurring problems: landing outside the £200,000 to £500,000 cost band once non-funded partner costs are included; leaving a charity or CIC as the lead applicant; assuming an academic partner can hold the project together; using overseas subcontractors without the required evidence trail of UK contractors approached and why they could not help — cost alone is explicitly not sufficient justification; and starting the IFS application so late that partners cannot complete their own cost sections and accept terms before the deadline.

Finally, be aware of the re-application rule. If you previously submitted an application that reached assessment, you can re-apply once more with the same proposal, and minor changes judged “not materially different” fall under the same rule. Funding will not be awarded if you have failed to exploit a previously funded project, have an overdue independent accountant’s report, or have failed to comply with grant terms.

Frequently asked questions

Can a sole trader lead? Yes. The lead must be a UK business of any size including sole traders and partnerships, and must evidence it is an established commercial business.

Can a research organisation take most of the budget? No. Research organisations doing non-economic activity share a maximum of 50% of total eligible project costs between them, and no single partner may exceed 70%.

Do I need my permits before applying? Question 4 accepts “in the process of being applied for,” but projects cannot be funded if the correct permits and licences are not in place by the project start date.

Can I reopen a submitted application? Yes, up until the competition deadline — but you must resubmit before the deadline closes.

What support is available if I need adjustments? Innovate UK makes reasonable adjustments for applicants with a disability or long-term condition. Contact them at least 15 working days before the closing date, which from today means acting well before mid-August.

How do I find a partner? Innovate UK directs applicants to Innovate UK Business Connect for partner-finding support.

Official links and contact

The competition listing is on the UKRI funding finder, and the full brief and application portal are on the Innovation Funding Service as competition 2529. Innovate UK’s guidance states that the competition brief on the Innovation Funding Service is authoritative and that other government or third-party sites cannot be guaranteed to show correct information — always confirm dates and rules there before submitting.

Innovate UK’s customer support line is 0300 321 4357, open 9am to 12pm and 2pm to 5pm UK time, Monday to Friday excluding bank holidays. The assessor guidance for applicants and the applicant briefing slides are both downloadable from the supporting information section of the competition page, and a pre-recorded briefing from 20 July 2026 is available to watch. Reading the assessor guidance before you draft is the cheapest single improvement most teams can make to their score.