ADOPT is open again: £50,000–£200,000 for a trial you lead on your own farm

Most innovation funding treats the farm as the trial site and someone else as the applicant. ADOPT — the Accelerating Development of Practices and Technologies Fund — is the one that works the other way round: the farming business leads, and the researchers and advisers join your project. DEFRA announced on 20 August that the latest rounds are open. If the £20m robotics competition was out of reach at £500,000 minimum, this is the fund sized for an actual farm.

The numbers

Full ADOPT Grant, Round 9 opened on 14 August and closes at 11:00am on Wednesday 7 October 2026. Total project costs must sit between £50,000 and £200,000 — the top end has doubled from the £100,000 of earlier rounds — from a pot of up to £5 million this round. Projects run 6 to 24 months, must start by 1 February 2027, and applicants are notified on 5 November 2026. For an active farming, growing or forestry business, grant covers up to 80% of eligible costs for industrial research — so a £100,000 project can mean roughly £20,000 of your own money to find something out properly, on your own ground, with help you chose.

Who can lead one

The lead must be an active farming, growing or forestry business based in England — established and commercial, and sole traders and partnerships count. Charities, CICs and non-profits cannot lead. Three conditions shape the project itself:

You need at least one other UK farmer, grower or forester in the project claiming grant funding — ADOPT wants small groups trying something together, not a solo effort. No single organisation may claim more than 70% of project costs.
You must appoint an approved ADOPT Project Facilitator from the Innovate UK Business Connect directory — this is mandatory, not optional.
Results are shared openly. If keeping the findings to yourself is the point, this is not your fund.

The £2,500 towards help — and the timing catch

Alongside it, Round 11 of the Facilitator Support Grant opened on 20 August and closes at 11:00am on Wednesday 30 September 2026: a £2,500 grant for an England-based farm business to pay an external Project Facilitator to help put a Full ADOPT application together. Now the catch, said plainly: applicants are notified on 17 November — after Round 9 closes. So this £2,500 pairs with the next full round, not the 7 October deadline, and it is only paid out once you show your full application actually went in. Two per person, ever, across all rounds. If you are aiming at Round 9 itself, the free route is the ADOPT Support Hub, run by ADAS, the UK Agri-Tech Centre and the Soil Association, which exists precisely to help you shape an idea into an application.

What a project actually looks like

Live examples, all farmer-led: a Yorkshire growers' club testing whether soil sensors and crop monitoring genuinely sharpen fertiliser decisions across two seasons; a Suffolk farm trialling aquifer recharge — pumping winter river water underground to draw out in a dry summer; and Cambridgeshire and Suffolk farms testing precision irrigation on onions and potatoes, targeting 20–25% water and energy savings, as DEFRA's drought write-up this week describes. If your own trial idea is nutrient-shaped, note you can establish the RB209 baseline for free with our fertiliser calculator and watch treatment differences from orbit with the NDVI viewer — a trial needs a control, and neither costs your project a penny.

What it will not fund

Crop variety plot trials, demonstrations of things already demonstrated, equine projects, aquaculture and wild-caught fisheries, cultivated meat and medicinal crop production are all excluded — the brief has the full list. And one application as lead per business, plus at most two more as a collaborator.

Apply

Sources

This is a summary, not advice. Eligibility, funding rates and the exclusion list are set out in the official competition briefs — read them in full before committing time or money to a bid.