Written by ffinlo Costain – Chief Editor of www.8point9.com. This article first appeared on 8point9.com.
This article is based on a conversation recorded live in the Sustainable Food Trust tent at Groundswell 2026. I sat down with Thomas Slattery of the ADOPT Support Hub, Matthew Smee of Agricology, and Katherine Lewis of Ag.Impact | Certified B Corp.
ARE farmers innovators? Matt Smee from Agricology doesn’t hesitate: farmers are constantly adapting to conditions that never stay still, whether that’s livestock, arable, horticulture or mixed systems. Thomas Slattery agrees, and 18 months into ADOPT’s life, the point has been proved, with hundreds of live farmer-led research projects now running.
Katherine Lewis, from Ag.Impact, traces her own involvement in farmer-led research back around 10 years, to the Innovative Farmers project she worked on at the Soil Association alongside Innovation for Agriculture and LEAF. Over its lifetime, the project supported more than a hundred farmer-led field labs with modest grants of around £10,000 that let farmers test their own ideas with proper rigour.
It is a debt Slattery is quick to acknowledge: without that decade of evidence-gathering, there would have been no case to put to Defra that farmer-led innovation was worth funding at scale.
Research from the ground up
The farmer-led model starts with a farmer’s challenge and works backwards. Smee, who ran a field lab himself years ago on buckwheat as an allelopathic weed suppressant before joining Agricology, describes discovering not just a method but a community: people wrestling with the same problems, building peer support that farming can otherwise lack. Rigour still matters, Lewis notes, but field labs were never about publishing academic papers. Instead, the structure and comparability they bring means one farmer’s result can genuinely inform another’s decision.
If ADOPT and Agricology sit closer to the farm gate, Ag.Impact is working a layer further upstream.
Lewis describes convening the Agricultural Universities Council, as well as funders of agricultural research, and chairing the farmer-led innovation network. Ag.Impact’s flagship project this year is an attempt to map, for the first time, where UK research and innovation funding actually goes: how much lands on crops versus livestock, basic science versus applied, robotics versus regenerative systems. At present, nobody has the full picture. Individual funders know their own portfolios; nobody has stitched them together or set that against what farmers and researchers actually think the priorities should be.
Impact, in this context, means something specific: a research system whose priorities line up with the challenges farming actually faces, and with what’s plausible both on farm and in the lab.
Traditionally, the panel notes, farmers have often experienced research as something done to them rather than with them, but Smee is careful not to single out universities; strong and weak practice exists across every type of institution. There can be a challenge, however, with large consortia, he suggests. Research at scale, which draws in so many partners, can overpower the researchers who are genuinely skilled at holistic, farmer-relevant work, leaving more of the output shaped by process than by practical insight. Knowledge exchange, he adds bluntly, is not always an academic strength, as many researchers would admit themselves.
I raised one counterpoint: the EU Horizon-funded PATHWAYS project, where Pasture for Life and other farmer organisations from across Europe were embedded as practice hubs helping shape the research design from the outset; a rare case of farmers influencing the science from the beginning.
What actually shifts research from paper to field, in Smee’s experience, is unglamorous: farmer-to-farmer conversations, meeting people where they are, without needing a polished video or a lecture theatre.
Valuing farmers’ time and knowledge
Both Lewis and Slattery point to a quieter cultural shift running alongside the funding one. Smee recalls a time, not so long ago, when farmers taking part in trials would openly ask why they were the only person in the room not being paid. ADOPT’s approach to properly remunerating farmers’ time and covering their costs is changing that, though Slattery notes the change has had to run in both directions. Farmers accustomed to filling 17 roles on their own holding, from vet to mechanic to, increasingly, data scientist, haven’t always thought of themselves as professionals whose time should be costed and paid for. Getting that shift to land has taken real work.
The flip side is farmers undervaluing their own tacit knowledge – the accumulated, embodied understanding of a specific piece of land built up over years – which Slattery has researched directly and still finds remarkably underrated by the system around it.
Building the infrastructure a local food system needs
Slattery’s recent work on place-based finance surfaces a bigger structural question: farm-level innovation can only go so far without the processing, markets and infrastructure to support it.
He points to Tom McVeigh, a farmer in Suffolk growing hazelnuts, who travelled to Italy and Turkey to understand the crop, discovered the UK climate is well suited to production, and is now trying to build a market from scratch as Turkish supply comes under pressure from its own changing climate. Infrastructure can be led from the farm outwards as well as built for farmers in advance.
Lewis offers a parallel from the Transforming UK Food Systems programme: a project called BeanMeals, which linked a bean grower, a hard-to-find local processor and a school, teaching children to grow, cook and eat the crop alongside their parents. It’s a small, specific intervention, but one that models what food system change looks like when it’s rooted in one place and one community, before anyone asks how to scale it.
Slattery is careful to frame this as recent rather than radical. The centralised food system farmers now operate within is, in historical terms, only two or three generations old, a product of post-war consolidation rather than any deeper tradition. Nobody on the panel is arguing against a centralised system entirely, but there’s broad agreement that rebalancing towards local and regional infrastructure, and building the unglamorous governance and finance structures that make it viable, is as important as any farm-level innovation.
AI, automation and the return to the land
The discussion turns to technology, and to a conversation I had earlier in the day about whether young people should be looking to farming as automation reshapes other careers. Slattery sees a real, if ironic, opportunity: as AI displaces more conventional office and professional roles, interest in hands-on rural work may grow, echoing arguments made by Tim Lang in Feeding Britain about the need to get more people back on the land. The constraint, he says, isn’t appetite but access to land itself, and organisations like the Ecological Land Cooperative are working directly on that problem.
On data, Lewis notes that farmers already generate more information than they can process through apps and sensors, and the real test for AI in farming is whether it can turn that volume into something genuinely usable, without farmers losing ownership or control of their own information. She points to the Wales Data Cube, a publicly available geospatial dataset covering soils and water across Wales, as a model of how that data might be opened up responsibly.
Slattery adds a note on automation more broadly, recalling Harper Adams University’s Hands Free Farm project, and its unlikely echo in an episode of Clarkson’s Farm where automated machinery freed up time for the more rewarding parts of the job. The best use of the technology, he suggests, isn’t replacing farmers but removing the boring, dangerous and repetitive tasks so people can get back to the parts of farming – working with animals, being outdoors – that drew them to it in the first place.
What’s still missing
Closing the conversation, each guest names the gap they most want to see closed. Smee wants AI-assisted mechanical weeding to become affordable enough to make organic and lower-input systems genuinely viable at scale, something he believes is a matter of when rather than if.
Slattery is preoccupied with reaching the roughly 80 per cent of farmers who aren’t yet showing up at events like Groundswell or using the language of innovation, but are, in his view, just as creative and capable as those who are. He frames it as a communications challenge as much as a funding one.
Lewis, mindful of Ag.Impact’s forthcoming state-of-the-sector report, stays deliberately neutral, but relays what she’s hearing from across the system: a call for genuine strategic research priorities that look 20 to 30 years ahead, built around interdisciplinary teams and, crucially, a proper seat at the table for farmers themselves.
Listen to the podcast yourself here: www://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/day-9-farmer-led-innovation-the-engine-behind-regen/id1490590788?i=1000776346759
Farm Gate podcast / Co-founder, Conference on Food and National Security: foodandnationalsecurity.org / TEDx speaker: We can’t solve the climate crisis without cows
