Growing Kent & Medway splits £500k among four horticultural innovators
Winners have been announced for the Prototyping and Demonstrator Fund from Growing Kent & Medway.
The consortium, whose partners include the University of Kent and UK Research and Innovation, has put £500,000 towards four projects looking to commercialise new technological advancements in horticulture.
MiDeVa (Mites Demonstration and Validation), led by Saga Robotics in partnership with the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB), was awarded £113,000 to help boost the automation of strawberry production.
The project will trial an innovative robotic approach to pest and disease control in commercial strawberry farms across Kent.
It marks the first ever deployment of Saga Robotics’ fully modular dispersal system for mites – beneficial insects used to control pests – during the strawberry growing season.
Next up is VineAI, a project from Deep Planet in collaboration with NIAB, English Wines, Gusbourne Estate, Nyetimber, and Rathfinny Wine Estate, which has received £144,500.
Deep Planet aims to detect and predict the presence of diseases like downy mildew and botrytis, which threaten grapevines in UK vineyards, by leveraging satellite imagery and AI.
The goal is to introduce cost-efficient and scalable precision agriculture solutions to the UK’s wine grape farmers and businesses, replacing inefficient disease detection methods of monitoring with human scouts or drones.
Then comes FutureDry, led by Drytec Spray Drying alongside Cambridge Glycoscience, which has been awarded £149,500.
The project will investigate how effective the traditional method of spray drying is for creating nutritious and sustainable food ingredients from byproducts of Kent’s food and farming sectors – particularly spent brewery yeast and cereal crops.
It ultimately aims to deliver industrial prototypes of novel food ingredients which could be used by food manufacturers as an alternative, non-animal protein source and for sugar reduction in food products.
Finally there’s RePizza, headed up by RePizza Ltd with the help of Cambridge Glycoscience.
With £149,000 from Growing Kent & Medway, the partners will bring to market an innovative new category of high-fibre, lower-calorie and more sustainable pizza bases for food service customers.
They’ll be making use of the latest innovation from Cambridge Glycoscience – Grain & Stalk (G&S) flour, which uses both the grain of wheat as well as the typically wasted or underused stalk
G&S flour could enable wheat farms to double their food output without using more land and resources.
As a manufacturer of artisan pizza doughs and bases for the hospitality industry, RePizza will then help bring the product to consumers.