As part of their ongoing work to support effort to tackle the challenges faced by the UK's AgriFood sector, Innovate UK took a leading role at last week's Fresh Produce Consortium (FPC) Future & Careers Event. 

Here, the £90m Transforming Food Production (TFP) challenge hosted a novel Innovation Village hub within the event to engage with representatives from across the food space about how to become involved in AgriFood-Tech innovations.

As well as experts from Innovate UK, within the Innovation Village six TFP-funded companies also showcased their projects and experiences of finding funding success. They included:

• Muddy Machines – a sustainable automation-based start-up that has successfully deployed electric robots in-field to tackle labour shortages within agriculture
• Spotta – a sensory technology provider that has developed a pioneering monitoring system to track and reduce the inefficiency of insect pests, and;
• Dogtooth Technology – who proudly displayed their state-of-the-art robotic fruit picker

Visitors to the Innovation Village were able also to attend thought-leadership talks on the future of farming and the cost of food production, as well as wider discussions on demystifying the process of grant funding and how to secure it. These sessions, hosted by the Innovate UK KTN Agrifood Team, worked to highlight the importance of funding and future opportunities available through Defra's Farming Innovation Programme, which is being run by the TFP team. 

Speaking about the event, Dr Tom Jenkins, Deputy Director for the TFP challenge at Innovate UK, said: "There are such great benefits to be had from the adoption of new agricultural technologies, whether it's fruit picking robots or the development of more sustainable fertilisers. By having a wide-ranging presence at such a key produce event, our aim was to inspire new connections, ideas and, hopefully, funding applications, not only through our speaking sessions, but also through audiences interacting with our project partners and demonstrators.

"Our role has always been more than just distributing funding, but also to help facilitate new opportunities, collaborations, knowledge sharing and the uptake of innovative concepts. Events such as FPC are an important part of our work to help the sector tackle its sustainability, productivity and net zero challenge together, and a great way to help innovators come together for the wider good."