Agri-TechE 2025: What’s Next?

Cast your mind back to 2013. What did you imagine agriculture and horticulture would be like in 2025?

Fields buzzing with drones monitoring fields 24/7?

Robots routinely managing plants and livestock without the need for human supervision?

Farmers gaining unique insights into the health and status of fields, soils and animals that aren’t possible through the naked eye?

Precise breeding solutions speeding up deployment of genetics?

New chemistry that sits alongside biological solutions to manage pests and diseases and boost plant and animal health?

Contracts and deals being done via blockchain?

Some of these technologies – such as the use of imaging and field analysis – are now routinely deployed at commercial scale on farms.

Others have taken longer to get where they need to be.

Farming in the future has always been a hot topic of discussion in an industry which every year is different. Agri-TechE was founded on the premise that farmers, alongside researchers and tech developers are highly innovative and as such would have a lot in common.

Experience tells us they do – but need a lot of help to get ideas ground in the lab or workshop, to delivering impact and benefit on farm.

The UK’s national agri-tech strategy was published over a decade ago to kick-start activities to get innovations developed to help increased productivity, profitability and sustainability in agriculture.

At our upcoming ‘Challenge Convention‘, we are asking what is needed to turbo-charge agri-tech into the next decade to realise its full-potential. Who needs to do what to get us to that future? What are the actions – from individual businesses, to investors, governments and supply chain actors – everyone will need to play their part.

We’re not looking to apportion blame, identify mistakes made or reflect on how things should have been done differently.

This is about looking forward and realising opportunity.

Building on some (as yet unpublished) findings from our “Back to the Future” project, we aim to pull together the expertise across the Agri-TechE community to “challenge convention” and agree what need fixing, changing or delivering to unlock the untapped potential for UK agri-tech.

Join us.

Challenge the convention. Let’s do things differently.