Soil Association welcomes new government fund

Dr Tom MacMillan, Innovation Director at the Soil Association, welcomes today’s new innovation fund announced by ministers: “The European Innovation Partnership (EIP) is great news for British farmers, recognising that so many of the best innovations in agriculture come from the ingenuity, experimentation and hard graft of farmers themselves. It celebrates that unsung investment by farmers and builds on it.”

Today’s announcement is about the EIP in England, a new programme which is part of the Countryside Productivity Scheme. Designed to develop practical ways to make farming more sustainable and productive, it crucially supports ‘bottom-up’ projects led by farmers.

Funding between £5,000 and £150,000 per project will be available to operational groups that are combinations of farmers, forest managers, researchers, land based or agri-food businesses and non-governmental organisations.

The Soil Association’s Duchy Future Farming Programme is one of the few precedents for supporting farmer-led research and development in the UK. Through on-farm ‘field labs’ farmers can test promising techniques and share ideas, with support from researchers and their peers.

The programme supports the development of new techniques and systems to improve productivity, quality and environmental performance in agriculture.

Tom MacMillan continues: “The Soil Association’s Duchy Future Farming Programme is an innovation support service for farmers, allowing them to share the risk in testing new approaches and get expert help on their own terms. We can help match farmers with the relevant researchers, providing a facilitator and some quality assurance to make sure everyone involved gets what they need from field labs and farm-based research. We will be helping the hundreds of farmers who are already involved in field labs apply to the EIP, and are happy to extend this to other farmers interested in innovative ways to improve their sustainability and resilience; our producer support team would like to hear from those with innovation ideas and can offer support to those wishing to apply to the EIP fund.”