You cannot apply to this round on your own.
I want to start there, because everything else about Farming Innovation Programme Feasibility Round 5 follows from it.
But for this round, your project must be collaborative. You need at least one other UK organisation alongside you.
Quick introduction before we get into it. I'm Mark, co-founder of GrantHero. I used to advise UK startups as an Innovate UK EDGE advisor, and these days I write live Innovate UK applications myself.
So what follows is the published guidance for this round, read and collated properly, plus what actually writing these things teaches you.
Here's why the collaboration rule matters more than anything else in this guide. The deadline is 11am on 9 September. A good consortium takes longer to build than the application takes to write. So your real deadline for having partners lined up is weeks earlier than the one on the competition page.
My aim here is to get you a clear answer on two things fast:
- Can you get in
- Can you build an eligible consortium in time
Then I'll show you how you can actually win the competition.
Should you apply? The 60-second check
Run down this table first. If you hit a "no" in the left column, the right column tells you what it means before you read another word.
| Can you say yes to this? | If no |
|---|---|
| You're a UK business that can evidence it's an established commercial business (sole traders and partnerships included) | You can't lead. Academics, charities and CICs can join but not lead |
| You have, or can secure in weeks, at least one other UK organisation as a project partner | Sole applications are ineligible for this round. Full stop |
| Your project will benefit farmers, growers or foresters in England | Out of scope. This is checked before assessors score anything |
| Total project costs land between £200,000 and £500,000 | Outside the project size limits |
| Your project can start by 1 January 2027 and finish by 31 December 2028 | Outside the competition window |
| No single partner will account for more than 70% of total project costs | Your consortium structure fails the funding rules |
Now let me get into the detail behind each of those, because the rules here knock out a lot of hopeful applicants before assessment even begins.
- Who can lead. The lead must be a UK business of any size that can evidence it is an established commercial business. That includes sole traders and partnerships, which surprises people.
- Who cannot lead. Academic institutions can join a project but cannot lead it, or work alone. Organisations without a commercial focus, including charities and CICs, cannot lead either. And sole applications are ineligible for this round. If you were planning to apply alone, that's not a weak application. It's no application.
- Who can join you. Your partners can be UK registered businesses of any size, academic institutions, not for profits, public sector organisations, or research and technology organisations. Any farming, growing or forestry business claiming grant must evidence it's an established commercial business with a UK bank account.
- The subsectors. Your project must address a significant industry challenge or opportunity in at least one of four industry subsectors: farmed animals, plants, novel food production systems, or bioeconomy and agroforestry. You'll also state which of these you're addressing in your scope description, so decide this early.
- What this round will not fund. The exclusions are specific, so check them before you fall in love with your idea. Projects are out if they: do not benefit farmers, growers or foresters in England; are equine specific; involve wild caught fisheries; involve aquaculture for fish production or human consumption; involve cellular expression of proteins or cultivated meat; involve acellular production systems, fermentation systems, bacteria, yeast or fungi for human consumption; or produce crops or plants for medicinal or pharmaceutical use.
One more thing before you commit, and I'll be straight with you. This is a feasibility competition. It funds you to find out whether your idea works, not to scale something you've already proven.
If your project is really a commercial rollout wearing a research hat, assessors will see it, and the scope check exists to catch it.
The important bits about this competition: money, dates and mechanics
The money.
Total project costs must be between £200,000 and £500,000.
You don't receive all of that as grant. Innovate UK funds a percentage of your eligible costs and you cover the rest, which is what people mean by match funding.
For feasibility studies in this round:
| Your organisation | Grant covers |
|---|---|
| Micro or small business | Up to 70% of your eligible costs |
| Medium sized business | Up to 60% |
| Large business | Up to 50% |
Research organisations doing non-economic work can share up to 50% of total project costs between them, funded at 100% (or 80% of full economic costs for academic institutions).
The dates.
The competition opened on 15 July and closes at 11am on 9 September. Your project must start by 1 January 2027, run for up to 24 months, and end by 31 December 2028.
Please note the 11am close. Innovate UK deadlines are late morning, not midnight, and every round someone finds that out the hard way. Don't let it be you.
How I'd plan the next few weeks.
The dates above are fixed. This plan is mine, working backwards from them:
| When | What needs to be true |
|---|---|
| This week | You've run the 60-second check and had first conversations with potential partners |
| By mid August | Partners committed in principle, roles and rough cost split agreed, 70% cap checked |
| Second half of August | The scored answers drafted, plus the project plan and risk register appendices |
| First week of September | Every answer reviewed against the scoring weights below, not just proofread |
| 8 September | Submitted. A day early. The system does not care why you missed 11am |
The collaboration mechanics.
Two rules decide whether your consortium is fundable:
- No single partner can account for more than 70% of total eligible costs. A lead doing 90% of the work with a token partner will not pass.
- If farmers, growers or foresters are claiming grant in your project, at least 50% of the grant they request must go to ones based in England.
What you're actually submitting.
Here's the full pack:
- Eleven scored questions (questions 8 to 18), 400 words each
- A project plan or Gantt chart appendix on question 15, mandatory
- A risk register appendix on question 16, mandatory
- Optional two-page appendices on questions 9 and 10, and my advice is to use them, because other winners will
- Seven unscored questions up front (locations, animal testing, permits, international collaboration, export controls, Trusted Research), plus project details including a 400-word scope description that decides whether you reach assessment at all
- No URLs anywhere in your answers, because assessors will not open them
Everything they score has to be on the page. If I could only give you one piece of advice about Innovate UK applications, it would be this: assessors give marks only for what is written down.
If your agronomist ran trials on a comparable problem at her last role, say so. That one sentence is worth more than a paragraph of enthusiasm.
What wins this competition
In my experience, most guides stop at eligibility. But eligibility only gets you to the start line, so let me show you where the marks actually sit.
Here is the full scoring breakdown for this round at one quick glance:
Three questions carry over half the marks. The need or challenge (20 points), your approach (16) and market awareness (16) add up to 52 of the 100 available. Whatever time you have, spend it disproportionately here.
The best applications tell one connected story. Those three questions are really the same thread: the problem, your solution, and the market that makes it worth solving. Start with a clear, compelling narrative around your innovation.
Answer each question directly; it sounds obvious, but it's the advice most often ignored. And make sure the connection between the problem, your solution and the evidenced size of the market holds from your first answer to your last. If that thread breaks, polish elsewhere won't rescue the score.
The commercial questions outweigh the operational ones. Market awareness, route to market and competitors total 32 points between them.
Project management and risk are worth 4 points each. The temptation is to polish your Gantt chart for days and give your competitor analysis an afternoon. The scoring says do the opposite.
The top band sets a specific bar for evidence. To score 9 or 10 on the need or challenge question, assessors need:
"Insightful evidence that the need or challenge is a critical issue for farmers, growers or foresters in England"
Not a real problem in general. A critical one, for that specific group, in England, with evidence. And the team question's top band wants detailed end-user engagement throughout the project, not a survey bolted on at the end.
Funded projects lead with the problem, not the tech. The examples from the official briefing all follow the same pattern, and I'd study them before writing a word. Blackgrass control robotics from ARWAC. Veterinary-only antibiotics for pigs.
A courgette harvester from Muddy Machines. None of these opens with technology. They open with a problem a farmer would recognise, then attach the innovation to it.
This is also where I see most self-written and ChatGPT-written applications quietly fall short. The writing is fluent, but it answers the question the founder asked, not the question the assessor is scoring.
Generic AI can't draw out evidence you didn't think to give it. That's exactly why I built GrantHero the way I did: it works like an experienced consultant running a scoping session, asking you the questions that surface the evidence, commercial logic, and project detail assessors actually score before a word gets drafted.
ChatGPT answers your questions. But GrantHero asks you the right ones to produce consultant-level quality at a fraction of the cost.
You can also maximise your success rates by getting expert human reviews at GrantHero.
FAQs about this competition
Do my partners need to be signed up before I apply?
Formally, agreements come later. But my honest answer is yes. The consortium is the time-critical path for this round, and partners found in the final week rarely make a coherent project story. Each partner also has to accept an invitation on the Innovation Funding Service and enter their own costs, which takes real calendar time.
Can we submit more than one application?
A business can lead on one application only, and join two further applications as a collaborator. If you're not leading anything, you can collaborate on as many as you like.
If I score well, am I guaranteed funding?
No, and this surprises people. The pot is capped, and Innovate UK can apply a portfolio approach, which means a lower-scoring project can be funded ahead of yours to balance the mix. A strong score is necessary, not sufficient.
How many people read my application?
Five independent assessors, and all of their scores count towards the funding decision. They don't confer. An application that relies on one sympathetic reader joining the dots will get five different sets of dots.
Can I resubmit if I miss out?
Yes. If your application reached the assessment stage, you can re-apply once more with the same proposal, and a "not materially different" version counts as the same proposal. But you won't be funded if you've failed to exploit a previously funded project, have an overdue independent accountant's report, or breached grant terms before.
Worth a month of your team's time?
If you lead a UK business with an early-stage farming innovation, a partner you can commit in the next few weeks, and a problem you can evidence as critical for farmers, growers or foresters in England, then honestly, I think this is one of the more accessible feasibility pots around. And the £200,000 floor makes it a meaningful project, not a token one.
Before you spend a month on any single competition, check which ones actually fit you.
GrantHero's free Discovery tool matches your business to relevant Innovate UK competitions, this one included.
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