Farmers set to benefit from £22 million investment for innovative equipment

Defra has today announced that £22 million will be awarded to farmers to spend on time-saving and innovative farm equipment.

The Countryside Productivity Small Grants scheme provides the opportunity for farmers to apply for grants of between £3,000 and £12,000 to invest in new and innovative equipment – from livestock monitoring cameras to precision farming technology – which help businesses save time and money and improve productivity.

The Rural Payments Agency will be writing to the 3,677 successful applicants from today.

Alastair Leake, director of the Allerton Project and policy at GWCT, said:

“As you know, we are keen advocates of taking land out of agricultural production to use to create wildlife habitat. We tend to look for less productive areas to do this with, but the result is an overall reduction in the gross yield of the farm and overheads having to be spread across a smaller acreage.

“At a time when world population continues to increase, and with it the demand for food, then investment in technology which helps to make the farmed areas more productive makes complete sense. At Allerton, we have started to use drones to make crop assessments more rapidly and accurately and have been employing a SPAD Chlorophyll meter to help fine-tune our fertiliser applications.”

To date, £37 million has been allocated to farmers in the scheme’s first two funding rounds, with a third and final funding round to open in autumn 2020.

You can find out more about the scheme here >