Watch: Farms are crying out for innovation, says UK-Agri-Tech Centre CEO
Speaking to AgTechNavigator at the sidelines of the recent World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in the UK, Bicknell said there's an appetite from farmers for "anything" that helps them make better decisions on farm and helps them put these decisions into practice.
Demand for environmental sustainability solutions is heavily policy led, as the UK strives to meet its net zero target by 2050, he explained.
"We know that even if we employed all the innovation we have available today, and we saw that taken up at scale, we wouldn't even get halfway to those targets," he warned. "So we need innovation to be able to lower our carbon emissions to have a more effective, more environmentally sustainable supply chain. We need to do that by balancing the carbon footprint of our industry with some of the biodiversity targets we have in place and some of those are generated by more extensive systems rather than intensive.”
Watch: Farms are crying out for innovation
Focus is needed on both improving quality of tech given to farmers and overcoming apoption barriers amoung its users, he added.
One of the priorities of the UK Agri-Tech Centre, for example, is ensuring there's a focus much earlier on in the innovation cycle on "what does the industry need; what's the problem you're trying to fix; what's the value to the industry if you solve it. I think that pulls innovation through the change faster."
One example of the company called Hoofcount, which is using AI to go into identify at an early stage potential lameness issues in dairy cows.
Hoofcount and the UK Agri-Tech Centre worked together on a two-year project to develop a ground-breaking lameness detection device. This project received £250,000 in funding from UK Research and Innovation as part of the government's Farming Innovation Programme
Calls for communication, collaboration and cash
Farmers are not resistant change, he said. "If something works. If it's fixing a problem and farmers see a value in it they will put in into practice," he said. But he identified that the “three Cs” of communication, collaboration and cash are needed to help farmers adopt newer sustainable practices.
The UK Agr-Tech Centre, he added, is keen to explore how it can initiate more public-private partnerships and more commercial money going into r&d in the sector so it isn't as reliant on the public purse in the UK as it might have been historically, he said.
