Minette Batters, President of NFU, gets update on Agri-Tech
Agri-TechE 
It was a pleasure to meet Minette Batters who has just completed her first 100 days as the NFU president. We gave her a short tour of the Innovation Hub to show the diversity of technologies being developed here.
She later spoke to Chris Hill of the EDP and said that a key concern among farmers at the Royal Norfolk Show was business uncertainty.
“There has been a diversity of opinion here. A lot of people are embracing the opportunities and some are very nervous about what lies ahead.
“Farmers are a pretty resilient bunch and they are used to evolving. There is definitely going to be a change and it is a question of whether they are going to get on the train and embrace that change.”
Innovations on show included ways of providing alerts to farmers through imaging, sensors and trackers that allow remote monitoring of plants and livestock and fine control of their environment. These types of technology can make the incremental improvements that reduce risk and improve productivity.
Sponsors of the Innovation Hub, BBRO were showing an electronic beet that could be used to understand the impact of the harvester on sugar beet.
Vicky Foster of BBRO explained that some varieties are more sensitive to handling than others. Improving the design of the harvester informed by the electronic beet could reduce loss at harvest.
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Just four years after Agri-TechE launched at Cereals, we are hosting a new ‘Innovation Insights’ event at Cereals 2018. Around 30 of our member organisations from across the value-chain will be giving two-minute elevator pitches, providing a snapshot of how the diverse cluster has developed.
Angshujyoti Das, founder and CEO of 
Co-founder and CEO Tashia Tucker comments: “We first got involved during the REAP conference last year and then joined as a ‘Seedling’ level membership. The support we have been given has been invaluable. It has helped us accelerate our knowledge of key organisations relevant to our work, and the diverse events that we have attended so far have introduced us to some key partners, expanded our understanding of different funding mechanisms as well as facilitated media exposure that has allowed us to reach a wider audience.
Pascale Martin of start-up 
Sugar beet is grown in East Anglia and East Midlands and is used as an ingredient in foods, beverages and pharmaceuticals with co-products used for animal feed and bioenergy. Yields have increased by 25 per cent over the last ten years and this has been achieved with the invaluable support of the British Beet Research Organisation (BBRO), a levy organisation that implements and commissions research specifically for the UK sugar beet industry.
Q. Sugar beet is the only UK crop that has seen yield improvement year on year. Can you give some examples of how BBRO has helped the industry achieve this?
Q. BBRO has recently introduced a new approach to field trials to allow closer engagement with farmers – please can you explain this and how it is going? 
Do you want a quick overview of the latest, exciting agri-tech that is emerging in the UK?
Food fraud could be losing the food and drink industry up to £12bn annually, according to a report by NFU Mutual (2017), and high profile cases of deliberate substitution of and tampering with food has impacted consumer confidence.
Marcus gives an example: “One of the applications I’m going to talk about is the use of blockchain in North American cannabis cultivation and distribution. Here blockchain is being used to meet the demands of regulators, consumers, supply chain relationships and financing outside of traditional banking systems.
Ahead of our Pollinator event “Finding the Funding”, we asked speaker Andy Cureton, Head of Business Engagement of BBSRC, to explain how the organisation – which is a major strategic funder of the biosciences – supports business.
