In March last year the KTN Plant Sector Advisory Board released its pre-competitive vision for the UK’s plant and crop sector. Alongside prioritising research needs, the importance of providing support for “Adopting Innovation” was seen as a priority for industry. More specifically, the vision document highlighted desired actions including:

Increasing farmer participatory research
Encouraging communication and collaboration between scientists and farmers and growers
Building capabilities around research or satellite farms

Taking on this challenge, KTN in partnership with the University of Sheffield are hosting a dedicated event to facilitate engagement between Agri-Tech companies and end-users. The event will take place on the 25th June 2019 and the agenda will include (TBC):

Session 1: Introductions followed by presentations on the social aspects of improving adoption; Barriers of Translation, Behaviour of Adopters and Innovation Pathways.

Session 2: How are end-users funded and supported? Highlighting projects where farmers/growers are driving the initiative including; “Small Robot Company” and Crop Health North”.

Session 3: Will focus on reporting back on a series of pilot studies, initiated by KTN, to highlight how the innovation process can benefit from additional end-user interaction and engagement can help SMEs to develop their innovation further into user-centric offers. Six innovative Agri-Tech SMEs, (FungiAlert, Optisense, BlakBear, Fotenix, Liquid Vision, Digital Farming, Crop Intellect) are currently being introduced to appropriate end-user groups and a number of these interactions will have the opportunity to report back on their experiences from both the SME and the end-user perspectives.

Session 4: Will focus on raising the profile of existing grower networks/groups both regional and national. Understanding their drivers and discussions on how best to support their active participation in future project applications.

If any this activity is of interest to you would like to get involved in the programme, please contact;

KTN’s Plant and Crop specialists, Chris Danks and Kaeli Johnson, or Meg Lewis, University of Sheffield, Knowledge Exchange Team.

*Please note that places are limited so register as soon as possible.

We are looking for a varied audience (Industry, Academia, Farmers/Growers, Funders) to ensure we can have can achieve an ‘Agri-Tech industry’ opinion around this critical requirement, to drive the discussions and subsequent outputs from the event. One key target is to map out the existing end-user landscape to highlight them and improve accessibility to them, so we are very keen to ensure as many end-user groups are involved as possible.

Supporting Early Adoption of Agri-Tech Innovations