The British Government’s Food, Farming and Environment Minister, Michael Gove, has promised to deliver an ambitious new UK food strategy in 2019, embrace a properly funded 25-year environment plan and commit to rising investments in agritech.
Leading British politicians and AgriTech industry representatives met in the House of Commons in London this week to focus attention on the development of a £500 million ($650 million) AgriTech Cluster, to be located on the edge of the university town of Cambridge, in the UK.
With highly skilled talent in many disciplines from animal and plant sciences to land management, the UK has a proven ability to develop and market new technologies.
The company’s development, called Actiphage, is aimed at a group of diseases caused by mycobacteria, including bovine TB which has already resulted in the slaughter of over 30,000 cattle in the UK and cost the British taxpayer more than £100m
Wefarm uses AI technology to connect small-scale farmers to crowdsourced information by enabling them to share techniques and advice on anything from how to battle a disease to how to increase their income, through SMS or online in their own languages.
Though Hummingbird began as a drone-focused precision agriculture company two years ago, it evolved beyond just drones as the team realized that the method of data collection is secondary to the data itself.
KisanHub targets agriculture enterprises, not farmers like most precision ag services, meaning suppliers, processors, and retailers that own some of their own farmland, but also have a network of contract farmers, are the company's customers.
Britain’s Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) is committing £5m ($6.9m) to fund the country’s farm sector PhD students in an effort to overhaul the UK industry’s “fragmented” innovation and skills pipeline.
As England’s only officially designated ‘Less Developed Region’, the area has received grant support from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and a range of local and national development partners.
Located at Harper Adams University, the Agri-EPI Centre is the first of four agritech innovation centers under the UK's agritech strategy that are being jointly funded by the ag industry and the government.
Brexit presents an opportunity for the UK to re-pivot, refocus and redeploy its capital and energies towards the nation’s value-added agricultural technologies and cutting-edge science capabilities, writes Richard Ferguson.
Roslin Technologies has spun out of the University of Edinburgh and The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, to raise £10 million ($12.4m) in funding to commercialize its first products.
Simon Kremer recently attended the Rothamsted Open Innovation Forum for agriculture technology, and here offers some thoughts on how IP plays into open ag innovation.
Andrew Vickery, head of rural services at UK accountancy firm Old Mill, argues that UK farmers should take advantage of the next few profitable years to plan for the future including investing in new technologies.
Wimbledon champion Andy Murray has invested in UK startup Hectare Agritech, which is the manager of two agriculture trading platforms: SellMyLivestock, and Graindex.
Green Collar Foods is raising $1.5m on AgFunder to build a flagship facility in Detroit, raise investment for new GCF locations, and further enhance its AgCloud solution.
