Science, Innovation and Technology Committee

Tuesday 7th July 2026

(began 2 weeks, 6 days ago)

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None Portrait Speaker 3
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Associate director in the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. I oversee our thematic research challenges, one of which is sustainable agriculture and food. Um, we do have obesity. We have micronutrient deficiency. We have hunger, climate change, geopolitics. Um, and also biotechnology and biological sciences research Council. I oversee our thematic research challenges, one of which is sustainable agriculture and food. I also coordinate research across UK around food systems. Um, so I think we need to look at the global challenge clearly, as you've articulated, um, we do have obesity.

We have micronutrient deficiency. We have hunger, climate change, geopolitics. Um, and also lots of things around resilience. I think, um, biodiversity loss, lots of sustainability challenges. So I think the future food system should ensure all people, and this is the FAO definition actually should ensure all people are able to access enough safe and nutritious food for an active and healthy life. And I think the vision is a thriving agri food sector. Um, that ensures food and nutrition security supports economic growth, um, provides resilience to some of those threats I highlighted earlier and is good for sustainability.

Um, I guess the key role for us in the UK is using our world class research and innovation and translating that into sustainable solutions both here and abroad. Um, I think agritech can add value in probably three major ways. So there's the kind of resilience to climate change and pests and diseases, whether that's precision breeding or um, early detection or operationalizing controlled environments. I think there's something around increasing sustainability, um, through precision agriculture, particularly reducing inputs, for example, and increasing productivity and nutritional content of the products that we do, we do produce.

Um, there's one other point I'd like to make is I think adoption of both high and low tech approaches are critical, um, by farmers both here and abroad. Um, I think there's a need to collaborate with farmers, um, including both academic led, but also farmer led. Crucially approaches because that effectively drives research into practice leads to farmer, farmer knowledge exchange, which I think is really important to try and solve some of these problems.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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Thank you. Um, well, I think from an economic perspective, there's always a level of bureaucracy because obviously it's taxpayers money. So it has to be protected and applied for correctly. Um, but I think over the, I suppose one thing that I always want to go back to is, is that agri food is part of we're funding things within agri food and innovate funds, all innovations. So we, we clearly do have some challenges within the sort of processes that we do for agri food companies, which, which don't hit other companies.

We have seasonality issues. We have issues with having to extend projects more regularly because of the climate issues and things like that. And so I think we've been rapidly trying to learn of how we can process applications more effectively and get decisions quicker to, to, to the SMEs. And I think that's particularly something important to them to understand what's available and the timelines that they are available in. And I think one of the comments that I've heard mentioned on one of the previous panels is continuity of funding support.

Um, we are probably, I've been involved since 2015 and we've had the benefit of having multiple programmes, although all different, all funding the same thing. So agritech catalyst then transforming food production and now the Defra Farming Innovation programme has been like a continual level of funding, although subtly, each one slightly different with different remits. That means, I think what we have done is build the SME community extensively. I've heard numbers of 40 times what it was in 2015, so there's a lot more businesses that are getting the.

Grants and understanding the process of them. And when we then move the grants into new areas like we did with the adopt programme with Defra, we realised that we had to change and make it easier for some of the farmers to apply. Farmers would not normally apply for an innovate UK grant. Historically, they may be part of collaborations, but in the adopt we needed farmers to go directly to it. So we did make the ability to fill the form much easier, especially on the costs that have to be indicated and sort of put into the application.

So I think that's really key. I suppose the final thing I wanted to just say as well that, that, um, we try to make sure that the assessment of the applications is appropriate to the size of the award. So we have had a policy since within, within the agri food park, is that all grants that are above or all projects that are above £1 million are always subject to an additional interview. Now, that does extend the process, but it really does put extra scrutiny rather than it just being, how good are you at writing the application?And we have many cases where we've had excellently written applications that have scored extremely well.

And then when they've got to the interview, the consortium has has failed under the challenges of the interview. And one of the things that we have done with the Farming innovation programme continually is have a farmer on that interview panel. And so it's quite amazing how many projects that on paper looked fantastic but didn't take the challenges of the farmer that was pressing them.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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Business connect.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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for agri food.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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Yes.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Right.
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None Portrait Speaker 6
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Yeah. 266 is the UK.
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None Portrait Speaker 3
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How much UK spends.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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That's correct.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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Yeah, yeah.
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None Portrait Speaker 7
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Sort of coincidental.
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None Portrait Speaker 7
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A strategy that.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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Um, I wouldn't know the number. I know from a, from a business led approach. Many countries I visited very rarely do that process. So a lot of it is through the academic and spin outs, rather than funding the businesses. So innovate in that sense is quite unique. I think definitely the Netherlands, they do because they have the, the triple helix of government, business and academia together. Um, so I think that works. I think I would say personally on the level that we have been maintaining at the moment is probably an appropriate level.

Unbelievably, um, from, from the development of the innovation part of it. Definitely we should be supporting that scale up, as we've touched on, and the ability to raise private investment. Absolutely. In more area. But what we're seeing in recent in the delivery of the different farming innovation programme is we are seeing a good level of consistent good applications, and we are funding a good levels. And that's been consistent now for the last six years. And programmes before that have done so.

So from a development of the innovation part, I think we're hitting about the right levels. The key bit then I think is, as we've touched on, is on the adoption part. Um, and, and, and being more, uh, in, in, in innovative with the way we fund the support of adoption and using technology like the adopt programme has already begun to show, which has only been running now for just over a year. But the but we will then start to see the technologies that we have been funding being deployed on farm and really being tested to see if they will stack up for for the longer term and the balance of that.

Then on many of the areas that we've been funding, they hit a natural point of scale. So whether or not that be a biostimulant that you're producing or a robotic fleet or a vertical farm, at some point you need to scale up. And only until recently have we started to focus on funding directly scale up. So we launched a programme as a pilot last year, and a competition at the moment called Agri Scale, which is specifically there to take businesses that have got an automotive.

In this particular first call, autonomous or robotic solutions. And rather than develop them more, make more of them. Who do you work with?What manufacturing partners?That's allowed us to work very closely. Then with the high value manufacturing catapult that we have in the UK, that is is has a huge experience from the automotive and space and aerospace industries, and translating that into agri tech. So taking agritech robots into scale up through that expertise that the UK has.

And that hasn't happened before. We haven't had the technologies at a late enough stage to start to really scale up. And then on the flip side, if you're if you're producing a biostimulant or a novel alternative protein, the scale up then is, is, is you need to get to a very large scale to have an impact on, on, on the dynamics of food. So then you really need to start scaling up into from 50l, 500l, 50,000, 100,000, and very large scale. And that's particularly a big focus of the engineering biology, uh, funding that's going in is to look at that scale up of those areas.

So I think that would be the area we are at this point. We should be increasing our funding. And that is something that the Netherlands has done previously by with the way that they've approached that and linking it into the private sector. So I think that would be a key point. Some of the some of the blue sky research is always required, and that should be a consistent level looking for new opportunities, monitoring diseases, all those things, the fundamentals. But from an innovation perspective, I think we really need to look at scale up and adoption.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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Yeah. And I think that's where the adopt programme is really starting to see that now that the farmers are seeing it. What that allows them to do is, and we've increased the grant size of that. So it can be a project up to 200,000. What that allows them to do is take the risk of using the innovation, the piece of equipment or, or an idea that they have. And if you lose yield or you have a problem, you're offsetting that because you're getting funded to do so.

And that takes that risk away. Not all the way, not completely away. I mean, there was a fabulous example on the Clarkson programme where he invested in the robot. For planting onions. And you know, he has a luxury of being able to do that in his life. And the entire crop failed because it didn't rain for. So there is always that risk. And I think that's where the adopt programme, where farmers are getting the pioneering farmers.

I think you heard from Tom Stevens. Those are the people that say, well, I want to try it, but I need to de-risk it a little bit. And that's why they adopt can come in as well as the equipment fund and other areas. And I think anything we can do to encourage de-risking so they can trial it. And, you know, just going back to your point chair on that cocoa farm in Newcastle University, that research farm that's on there is the perfect place to convene those.

They put in the first anaerobic digester. And and it was it was implied that, oh, you just put anything in it and it works. And that isn't the case. They brought farmers constantly there to see. Actually, you need to understand how an anaerobic digester works to get the most out of it. And that needs farmer to farmer interaction and then demonstration of it. And I think that will be the key to getting. And of course, all the things we fund are not all going to work.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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Well, I think um we have um a very different kind of um landscape, agricultural landscape than they have in the Netherlands. Uh it's a, in the Netherlands it's much more homogeneous. They do much more monoculture. They just, they do a lot more intensive greenhouse. Schemes. Whereas in the UK we have a much more heterogeneous, uh, topography. Um we have um um. Land, uh, we have, we have, um um different. As, as you said, across the whole country have different soil compositions, different water compositions, etc.

that's very different from what happens in the, in, in the Netherlands. So I think there's a lot that, um, that we do that is adding value to what they're doing and is very different and is contributing in a different way, uh, to our global understanding of, of, of, of agriculture. Um, I think that they, they do, um, they have, um, agriculture and, uh, agri food and horticulture is a, a major government priority in their, and their investment is considerably, considerably greater than ours. Um, and they have um.

Uh, so that enables a different kind of, of, of, of, of, of research, but as, as, as Chris says, you know, I think we manage really well with what we have to get that to get that added value. Um, we also have, um, um, programs, um, within our national capabilities that around the country, for example, at Rothamsted, there's a Northwick farm, which is a farm lab, which actually provides the kind of test, the test grazing open data sharing, uh, working with farmers, collaborating with farmers, doing knowledge exchange events, which maximizes the potential actually of quite a diverse landscape at that, in that farming space.

So I think we have a different, um, we are able to offer and learn, um, different kinds of things from, from, from, from the Netherlands, not, not everything that's going on in the Netherlands is relevant to the UK.
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None Portrait Speaker 4
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Yes, absolutely.
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None Portrait Speaker 7
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Oh.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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Absolutely. I suppose, I suppose what I was given is examples which it is incredibly complicated landscape for food production. What works for one thing doesn't work for another. Whether or not you use a vertical farm, whether or not you use a broadacre cropping and the technologies, everyone is different. And I think this is where it's the complexity of the challenge makes it the complexity of the innovation landscape, particularly to address all those things, because you're absolutely right. If if we can't control the climate and we can't control crops that it needs, what's the alternative?Well, there are alternatives.

We can produce stuff indoors. We need electricity to do. So we can, you know, remove livestock and do it. Fermentation through cultivated meats. But those should be all choices. They should be all aspects of food production for it to hit the challenges that we have globally, we have to look at all forms of innovation and all forms of food production, because we can't just rely on what we have been relying on because we can no longer trust the weather.

And in countries that are changing, they are having to adapt to different weather. So I think you're absolutely right. And I think that's one of the key bits of innovation. We, you know, we wouldn't we wouldn't have glasshouses if we didn't have innovation. And now most things are grown under cover or protected cropping under polytunnels and the like. And so I think it, it is a really difficult question because the challenges globally are really hard, you know, um, and, you know, as a society, we've made some poor choices in, in, in the need to produce more food in like destroying rainforests to do so.

But you've got to now stop and look at how we can do it differently. And the only way to do it differently, I think, is you've got to do it lots of different ways. And when we did the programme Transforming Food Production, we looked at all sorts. We we still focused primarily on optimising traditional agriculture, getting better efficiency, getting better value out of livestock, and crop production, but also looking at insects, looking at algae, looking at all these different things, because the need for protein is going to be there.

And we have to look at all those alternatives. And if we don't, we are going to fall foul because at some point the system is going to break.
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None Portrait Speaker 9
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Thank you.
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None Portrait Speaker 5
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Yeah I.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Suppose prioritize.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Right. Okay.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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We will come to that.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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Right.
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None Portrait Speaker 10
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Thank you very much. Um, so I'm Anjali Goswami, I'm deputy chief scientific adviser and the director general for science data analysis. Um, and uh, for this inquiry, I can speak mainly to different responsibilities in terms of domestic food security and farming systems, agrifood innovation, biosecurity, trade and space. Um, and more broadly, from our perspective, from the different perspective, the point is really that UK and global food security are linked in our own food security here is, is certainly linked in with international global food security.

The UK is very much a part of an international food feed, fertilizer and raw material supply chains. And so shocks overseas can impact that. As we are witnessing now. Um, however, domestic production is also um susceptible to shocks, as we have just heard in terms of climate change, certainly impacting the weather here. And in the previous session about increases in, for example, extreme events also affecting domestic production. So in terms of food security, it really has to be a dynamic consideration of both international and domestic impacts.

So we need resilience in both of those areas. And so this is something that is certainly front and center in thinking in Defra at the moment and working across government as well. Um, obviously our because our primary remit is within the domestic food production area, we are looking at this from that. So we've published multiple things recently looking at the farming roadmap, land use frameworks, which are really thinking about that resilience angle, both in terms of, um, geopolitics and supply chains, and also from the perspective of climate adaptation.
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None Portrait Speaker 8
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So I come at this as a development minister. So when I. So yes, we are funding exciting globally leading research into this area and we are successful at it and have been for some time as a country. My challenge is in part how that research and it could be into drought resistant, drought resistant crops. It could be into animal vaccines, whatever it is, how you get that benefits of that innovation to be felt in some of the most difficult, um, contexts in the world.

That is a real challenge. And that's a challenge of diplomacy. It's a challenge of understanding social networks and how, um, countries are organised, how communities function, what the links are between governments and communities. It gets incredibly complex. But that's the job because otherwise you've come up with something really exciting, completely fail to implement it. So the way links are between governments and communities, it gets incredibly complex. But that's the job. We've managed to do this, and I think this is where the challenge of scale and working through the multilateral development banks is going to and the UN agencies is going to be vital.

But just to give an example, as in Nigeria a few weeks ago, we have um. An initiative there which is around vaccination of animals, of livestock. Um, we, could, because communities are remote and um, familiarity with these kinds of interventions. Um, is, is non-existent in many cases. And there is a real need to get um, smallholders to adopt these technologies. You first need a relationship of trust because you're asking them to do things to their animals. And often you're asking them to pay for that as well.

So what we've done is, um, support local veterinary services businesses to recruit local farmers, often women and train them in how you administer these vaccines. Um, how you discuss these vaccines and some of the technology behind them, some of it, um, devised in the northeast, by the way, and there's a chicken disease called Newcastle Disease, which I was able to vaccinate a chicken against, but.
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None Portrait Speaker 8
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Not always.
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None Portrait Speaker 8
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They should.
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None Portrait Speaker 1
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African Union.
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None Portrait Speaker 10
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Sure. Happy, happy to take that question. So in terms of agritech, um, with obviously the recent changes in terms of privatisation and Ukri, which we were hearing about in the previous session, um, agritech is part of the advanced manufacturing sector in the industrial strategy. Um and it is very much viewed as a growth opportunity for the UK. Um the aim is for the sector to increase UK turnover in this area by about 7 billion over the next decade, up to about 20 billion by 2035.

Is, is the aim our main contribution to agritech in Defra is through the Farming Innovation Programme, which we have, um, a £173 million investment this year. Um that comes through a variety of approaches. Um there's the broader programme. We also have a um a farmer, um, let me remember the exact name of it. The tech fund, um which. Helps farmers actually invest in technologies that they can apply. So there's 50 million allocated to that this year.

We have the adopt programme, which is funded to specifically support the translation of of R&D into use. So that's accelerating development of practices and technologies. And we have the agri scale programme which helps new businesses actually scale into a larger scale business of getting over that hurdle from having a product that works to actually getting the manufacturing at scale. And so that's a variety of the topics that we cover with the Farming Innovation programme, which we work very closely with innovate UK to deliver, um, this year.

So each year we also identify a key, a few key theme areas to focus on. So this year our focal areas will be um, in uh, automation, robotics as well as in soil and water health and quality. And those are pivotal from the perspective of long term food security, because that builds resilience into the system. When you degrade your soils, when you degrade your water supply, that will have impact on your ability to grow food into the future. So those are some of the key areas in agritech that we are, we are investing in.

But this, um, is an area. That is certainly an investment as part of the industrial strategy.
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None Portrait Speaker 11
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You.
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None Portrait Speaker 3
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In a bit.
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None Portrait Speaker 7
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So.
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None Portrait Speaker 8
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Our Reflows.
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None Portrait Speaker 8
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You didn't.
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None Portrait Speaker 13
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Um, the.
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None Portrait Speaker 7
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British companies.
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None Portrait Speaker 8
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I hope.
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None Portrait Speaker 13
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You that.
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None Portrait Speaker 7
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Okay.
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None Portrait Speaker 10
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Okay. Sure.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Artificial intelligence in this case, and using artificial intelligence in combination with other kinds of innovation. So if we look at, for example, um, earth observation. So using satellite data in combination with AI is already showing benefits both domestically but also internationally through things like the geo glam um network that was launched by the G20. So this is the group for earth observations for, uh, global, um. Uh, land for agriculture, something along these lines, agriculture management and using systems like that, you can, um, monitor soil moisture and get really refined data on things like that using, again, a combination of AI and satellite imagery.

You can also use AI in combination with engineering biology, for example, to improve genetic enhancements of crops. Robotics is another key area where we are addressing both, um labor shortages as well as improving precision agriculture with more direct applications of things like nutrients, um, improvements in fertilizer. So novel for shortages as well as improving precision agriculture with more direct utilizers that are again, better targeted to specific systems, which will both increase crop yields, but also reduce the environmental impact of things like excessive fertilizer use. And then, of course, using things like Edna.

And so this is this is a great technology where we can start to better understand, for example, soil microbial communities and be more targeted, as opposed to the approach that we currently use. So those are all areas that I think are, um, really exciting innovations that will directly benefit domestic farmers as well as farmers on the, on the international scale.
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None Portrait Speaker 2
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Yeah, I'll do that.
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None Portrait Speaker 14
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Yes.
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None Portrait Speaker 15
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Yeah, sure.
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This debate has concluded
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