New £50k fund to support agriculture’s Journey to Net Zero

Today sees the launch of a £50,000 investment to support British agriculture in achieving its ambition to be net zero.

The Journey to Net Zero competition has been launched by the School of Sustainable Food and Farming (SSFF) and is supported by Bradford Estates, Harper Adams University, McDonald’s, Morrisons, the NFU and Trinity Ag Tech and Trinity Global Farm Pioneers.

With a total prize fund of £50,000, the competition will award cash prizes of between £5,000 and £20,000 to fund scalable systems or processes which will help farmers to manage their businesses in a sustainable way.

The winners will be announced at the end of this year and their progress will then be tracked and publicised by Farmers Guardian throughout 2023 to spread their learning across the industry.

Announcing the competition, Prof Michael Lee, vice-chancellor of Harper Adams University, said: “SSFF at Harper Adams University is delighted to launch this competition to help our farming community realise this vital transition.

“Harper Adams University, working through our new SSFF and supported by our industry partners, is committed to deliver training and research needed for a just transition to support all UK agriculture, be that through reducing methane emissions of ruminant livestock, improving soil health, or realising biodiversity improvement in mixed cropping systems.

“We are working with some of the UK’s brightest and most innovative farmers and we really look forward to expanding this network through the competition. We realise that the greatest take up of technology and interventions is through seeing these implemented on real farms, hence the excitement around this competition.”

Harriet Wilson, agriculture and sustainable sourcing manager for McDonald’s, said: “Farmers are well known for being entrepreneurial inventors, often driven by the need to adapt to situations on-farm.

“Net zero and the climate challenge is probably the biggest driver of necessity to change that we will face over the next 10 years and the inventive farming mind is well placed to come up with some of the solutions.”

For more information about the competition and to enter, please visit: www.fginsight.com/NetZeroCompetition

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