Stop press – GROW

Congratulations to all our finalists in the GROW 2015/16 business plan competition, we had six strong presentations demonstrating an inspiring selection of business concepts.

GROW was devised to identify and support those UK agri-entrepreneurs with ideas to help agriculture and horticulture. By leveraging the highly supportive environment in the east of England for early-stage business creation and development, the aim of GROW is to help these new agri-business grow into fully fledged companies that can bring real benefits to the industry.

Details of the winners  – Pinpoint Phenomics, which is developing a way of understanding internal plant signals to help boost crop yields and SoftHarvest, which is developing an automatic harvester to allow just-in-time picking of lettuces – and the finalists are detailed here.

Thank you to Agrii for hosting the event at its Throws Farm Technology Centre, to Michael Lee Managing Director of Syngenta Ventures for his insightful key note, to InnovateUK for its support for the competition, and to our judges for their time and deliberations.

Also to the portfolio of organisations that have provided support prizes: AgriGate Research Hub (Niab), Barr Ellison LLP, Cambridge Cleantech, Cambridge Network, Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at Cambridge Judge Business School, Future Business Centre, ideaSpace City, Institute for Environmental Analytics, Norfolk Network and Norwich Research Park.