DATES:
Competition closes: 11th June 2025, 11:00 am. Support Grant deadline is 11th June.
Applicants notified: 10th July 2025. You will also be notified here if your Support Grant was successful.
Project start date & duration: Last between 6 and 24 months, starting by 1s September 2025.
SCOPE – proposals must
- Have the potential to significantly improve one or more of the following; productivity, resilience, or sustainability and progression towards net zero farming.
- Focus on testing or trialling ideas or solutions that are either new or not yet widely used.
- Demonstrate their benefit to other English farmers, growers, or foresters.
- Outline how you will communicate and share project outputs during and after project work.
SPECIFIC THEMES
Your project must address a significant industry challenge or opportunity in at least one or more of the following sectors; 1) agriculture, 2) horticulture, and 3) agro-forestry.
OUT-OF-SCOPE – funding won’t be given for projects that;
- Don’t benefit English farmers, growers, or foresters; are based on equine systems, wild caught fisheries, medical or pharmaceutical crops, crop variety plot trials, aquaculture, or fermentation systems for bacteria/yeast or fungi/cultivated meat.
ELIGIBILITY
- To lead a project you must be an active farming, growing, or forestry business of any size based in England, and able to evidence you are an established commercial business, with a UK bank account.
- To lead you must collaborate with at least one other farming or growing business based in the UK.
- You must have a Project Facilitator as part of the project team who is listed in the ADOPT Innovate UK Business Connect database.
- To collaborate with the lead you must be a UK registered business of any size, academic institution, charity, not for profit, public sector organisation, or research and technology organisation.
- Subcontractors are allowed, preferably from the UK. You can use subcontractors from overseas but must make the case in your application as to why you cannot use subcontractors from the UK.
FUNDING RATES
- The total grant funding request must be between £50,000 -£100,000.
| Organisation size | Industrial Research (TRL 3-5) |
| Active farmer, grower, or forester (excl. NI) | <80% |
| Micro/small business (or active farmer, grower, or forester in NI) | <70% |
| Medium sized business | <60% |
| Large business | <50% |
Up to 100% of eligible costs for RTOs, charity, not for profit, public sector, or research organisation. 80% of full economic costs (FEC) covered for Je-S registered institutions (such as an academic).
How PNO can support you
The UK team has a strong track record in securing some of the most competitive national and European grants on behalf of its clients, with a full understanding of how a project should be presented to stand the highest chance of success. Each year in the UK alone, we are responsible for the submission of more than 100 funding applications across all sectors and priority areas. Based on this extensive experience, through careful project selection and using key insight into how a project should be best positioned, we consistently achieve success rates that are more than 5 times the typical success rates for UK national schemes and EU programmes.
For further information or to discuss a project idea please contact PNO Consultants
0161 488 3488 | info.uk@pnoconsultants.com
