Funding Opportunities

The Defra Farming Advice Service provides essential, free, and confidential technical and business guidance to farmers to help them meet the complex regulatory requirements governing their operations. This support is crucial for the foundation of the food system, ensuring that primary production—farming—adheres to standards for environmental protection, animal welfare, and cross-compliance obligations related to schemes like the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS). By focusing on compliance, nutrient management, and legislative changes, FAS helps maintain the quality and legality of UK food sources, offering stability and reducing the risk of penalties across the agricultural supply chain.

Business Academy The DBT Business Academy focuses on upskilling food and drink businesses, particularly SMEs, in the necessary skills for international trade. This support is vital for growth beyond the UK domestic market. The academy offers structured learning, expert guidance, and readiness assessments covering topics like logistics, market selection, regulatory requirements in destination countries, and e-commerce for export. By equipping producers, manufacturers, and processors with these trade capabilities, the Business Academy directly helps the UK food system increase its global reach, attract foreign investment, and boost the overall value of food and drink exports.

DBT's Finance and Support mechanisms are essential for scaling up food system capacity, especially in manufacturing and processing. This function offers a range of tools, including access to funding opportunities, tailored finance options, and connections to UK Export Finance (UKEF). For food businesses, this means assistance in securing working capital to fulfil large international contracts, financing machinery upgrades, and insuring against buyer default. This financial backbone enables businesses in the food supply chain to invest in productivity improvements, adopt new technologies, and expand production, directly strengthening the sector's resilience and competitive edge.

The York and North Yorkshire Growth Hub is a key regional enabler for the food system, as this area is renowned for its agriculture, food manufacturing, and bioeconomy sectors. The Growth Hub provides bespoke support, ranging from one-to-one business advice to access to grant funding through initiatives like the Mayor's Business Innovation Fund (which includes "Get Exporting" programmes). Crucially, the Growth Hub’s Business Board includes members dedicated to the Food & Drink and Bioeconomy sectors, ensuring policy and resources are directed toward innovation, sustainability, and market growth for local food producers, processors, and related agri-tech companies.

The West Yorkshire Combined Authority supports the food system by integrating it within its broader manufacturing and skills strategies. While its support is directed across multiple sectors, food and drink manufacturing is a major component of the region’s industrial base. WYCA provides targeted support through its business growth programs, offering funding, skills training, and innovation assistance to manufacturers. This includes helping food producers adopt Industry 4.0 technologies (automation, digitalization), improve operational efficiency, and access specialist support to upskill their workforce, ensuring the local food supply chain remains productive and competitive.

Invest East Yorkshire focuses on inward investment and business growth, particularly supporting the large and diverse agricultural and food processing cluster in the East Riding area. Their support is tangible, offering 1-2-1 advice, grant funding (often leveraging UK Shared Prosperity Funding), and access to physical business centres. For the food system, Invest East Yorkshire helps with farm diversification projects, assists local food and drink businesses in scaling production (as seen in case studies), and manages The Supply Chain Network Supplier Directory, which actively promotes local sourcing and collaboration between regional food producers and hospitality businesses.

Support under the banner of "South Yorkshire Business" is generally delivered through the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA) and associated partners (like Business Sheffield), often leveraging funds like the UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF). SYMCA's focus areas, such as advanced manufacturing, life sciences, and green energy, intersect with the food sector through food technology, packaging, and sustainable production challenges. They offer innovation support, productivity challenges, and grants to SMEs, which allows local food processors and manufacturers to adopt automation, improve quality management systems (essential for regulated food fields), and overcome skills shortages in engineering, thereby boosting efficiency in the regional food supply chain.

Innovate UK Business Growth (formerly Innovate UK Edge) provides high-intensity, bespoke support for innovative SMEs within the food system, from start-ups to established companies. Their core contribution is accelerating the commercialisation of new ideas across agriculture, food production, and processing technology. They specifically cover the AgriFood sector, connecting businesses with research facilities (like the Agri-tech centres: Agri-Epi, Agrimetrics, CHAP, and CIEL), providing access to funding, and helping secure intellectual property. This support drives crucial innovations in sustainability, digital agriculture, and food safety, ultimately transforming the future resilience and competitiveness of the entire food system.

The King's Trust (formerly The Prince's Trust) supports the food system primarily by empowering young people (aged 18-30) to launch new businesses, including those in the catering, food production, and retail sectors. Through its Enterprise programme, the Trust provides mentorship, business planning guidance, and financial assistance in the form of Start Up Loans and Grants (up to £30,000 combined). This mechanism acts as a critical pipeline for injecting entrepreneurial talent and new ventures into the food service and small-scale manufacturing economy, supporting diversity and innovation at the grassroots level of the food system.

The UK Government, primarily via Defra and the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Strategic Priorities Fund, is transitioning funding from the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) to new environmental and productivity-focused initiatives. The focus is shifting to systemic implementation, with future funding targeting actionable policy and business changes.

Environmental Land Management (ELM) Schemes: The new system includes the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) (now closed for applications), the Countryside Stewardship Higher Tier (CSHT) (re-opening September 2025, focused on large-scale environmental protection and climate change mitigation), and Landscape Recovery (currently closed).

Transforming Food Systems Programme: Future funding will specifically target the 27 recommended action areas, including scaling up interventions to make healthy, sustainable food more affordable, driving forward legislative changes (like mandatory surplus food redistribution), and supporting the implementation of a national Sus-Health Index for unified health and environmental food labelling.

Farming Innovation Programme (FIP): Continues to provide R&D grants to improve productivity, sustainability, and resilience across agriculture and horticulture.

Future R&D grant funding from Innovate UK (part of UKRI) will be aggressively focused on accelerating the UK's transition to Net Zero food production and sustainable intensification. Anticipated funding calls, including Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) and targeted Grants, will fund disruptive Agri-Tech, including AI-driven precision farming, robotics, advanced automation, and novel protein sources (such as plant-based, fermented, and cultivated meat technologies) that have a significantly lower environmental footprint. Support will be directed towards projects that can rapidly scale up proven technologies for commercialization (moving from TRL 4-5 to 7-8), particularly those that enhance supply chain resilience, radically reduce waste, and improve the nutritional content and shelf-life of products through programs like 'Better Food for All' and the Farming Innovation Programme.

Under its 2024-2028 strategy, the RCF aims to accelerate its impact by raising £15 million and adopting a "power up, not prop up" philosophy. Future funding will be strategically directed toward long-term sustainability and resilience across four key themes: 

(1) Environmental Stewardship (helping farmers adapt to and implement nature-friendly policies); 

(2) Economic Viability (supporting farm succession and diversification); 

(3) Community Empowerment (strengthening rural social infrastructure and local services via Rural Grant Programmes); and 

(4) Next Generation Skills (creating pathways to keep young people in the countryside). 

The RCF focuses on supporting Family Farm Businesses through initiatives like the Farm Resilience Programme, expanding its county-level model, and investing more heavily in localized grants (targeting £3M for rural community-led projects) to drive self-help networks and preparedness for climate change impacts.