Following CONNECTED’s recent award of £500K from UKRI International, we have now launched our plan to leverage more impact from the pump-prime funded research projects created by the initial grant.

How will this work?

We got in touch with all our pump-prime funded research teams to discuss ways in which they might be able to exploit, translate and disseminate their work, building on what was learned to take it further or convert it into practical applications that will have a real impact on agriculture, particularly in developing countries.

For those projects able and keen to do this, we invited them to outline their ideas and apply to us for funding to deliver them. We then worked with Crop Health and Protection Ltd (CHAP) to provide expert industry advice to augment these impact roadmaps/proposals and maximise the benefits they will be able to realise. Project teams presented and discussed their research and impact proposals with a panel of experts, building in further considerations including economic impacts, maximising opportunities for local production, and work necessary to take technologies further towards implementation.

Successful projects have now been informed and will each receive awards of up to £25,000 to undertake a range of amazing work, everything from ‘crop walks’ to engage farmers in research, through to testing native entomopathogenic fungi as biopesticides for whitefly.

The Network Team will work with project teams to ensure impact is harvested throughout these new phases – watch this space for updates on progress! In this way, we will be able to fund and track the impact from this initial research, and see it translate into real-world applications.