HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE DUCHESS OF EDINBURGH JOINS FARMING RESEARCH AND INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM DISCUSSSION

Involved were 15 organisations discussing four themes:

1. Remote sensing, MRV and technology – with speakers from Innovate UK, Agrisound, PES Technologies and Pollybell Farms.
    
2. New improved and novel crops – with contributions from Defra, UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH), Niab and Innovative Farmers.
    
3. Productivity and business insights – with UK Agri-Tech Centre, Hutchinson Group Ltd, HESTIA viticulture project and Rothamsted Research.
    
4. Knowledge Exchange – with Root and Reason, University of Plymouth – Sustainable Soil Alliance and LEAF
    

“The Duchess of Edinburgh is committed to shining a positive spotlight upon agriculture, farming innovations and has a strong desire to highlight STEM opportunities for young people,” explained Harriet Cherry, from the Groundswell team, who organised the event with Judith Batchelar, Chair of UKCEH.

“This gathering marks a significant moment for an industry facing some of its greatest challenges - the urgent need to produce more nutritious food for a growing global population, while simultaneously restoring and improving the natural environment – very firmly at the heart of why our family started Groundswell 10 years ago.”

Judith Batchelar OBE said: “Groundswell has long been recognised as a unique environment where peer-to-peer learning, knowledge exchange, and the sharing of practical solutions have become the norm. Unlike many industry forums, the insights exchanged here are offered generously, with a shared commitment to finding workable answers to the challenges farmers face every day.

“The researchers and entrepreneurs present at this event are the trailblazers leading the way in the hope that what they have developed can be scaled to make a material impact. I hope that what is best practice today will be common practice tomorrow, and that this event will allow us all to amplify what we witnessed from the discussions.”

The technologies shared were diverse, including AgriSound, a business that has pioneered the use of acoustic sensing and AI to monitor pollinators in real time, PES Technologies’ instant soil testing device which delivers over a dozen key soil health indicators, with GPS tagging and time stamping, in under 10 minutes – all from just a dessertspoon full of soil and Earth Rover’s CLAWS (Concentrated Light Autonomous Weeding and Scouting) robotic weeder, being trailed with a host of other technologies at Pollybell Farms.

Developed by James Brown, owner of Pollybell Farms, CLAWS can remove 60 weeds per second, said, with light targets the growing point of the weed, with the potential to reduce the one million tonnes of herbicide put into the atmosphere annually.

Richard Pywell from UKCEH explained their project aimed at signposting the farming sector towards future crops. He said: “There are large areas of land less suitable for growing crops in the future because of climate change, so the need to understand new, novel crops is essential. We’ve scanned 160 crops in the ‘Top of the Crops’ research enabling farmers to look up crop options like citrus, chickpeas and rice. The next stage is to undertake UK trials and processing, which we have started by taking 18 trial crops of risotto rice to yield.”

Speaking at the event, organisers emphasised that adaptation is now essential. "We have to build a more resilient sector so that we can cope with these shocks and the disruption that brings. Adaptation requires us to do things differently."

In the Productivity and business insights session, Fleur Delany from Oxford University, highlighted the HESTIA project, designed to quantify the effects of agriculture worldwide. The open-access platform hosts information from over 135,000 farms globally and can be used to analyse the sequestration of certain crops – as the team has done with UK Vitculture.

Fleur said: “The UK wine sector that has expanded six-fold in the last 20 years. While grapevines and vineyard soils naturally capture carbon, we haven't known whether English vineyards operate as net carbon sinks that help the planet, or carbon sources that add to emissions due to intensive management practices.” What the team found was that English vineyards are, on average, net carbon emitters but crucially, where they are sited on converted crop land they become net carbon sinks.

The ambition is that this gathering becomes an annual fixture for Groundswell.

The Duchess said of the discussions: “It’s clear we don’t just need one technology, and studying all of this together, it makes the most wonderful story for agriculture, and it needs to be told more widely.”

Judith Batchelar OBE concluded: “This was a unique event. For the first time we brought together individuals and organisations from across the whole farming research and innovation ecosystem. I am confident that new relationships will be formed, and experiences shared because that is what the farming sector is especially good at.”

The session was hosted on the Root and Reason stand at the 2026 Groundswell Event. Groundswell is held on 1 and 2 July at Lannock Farm, Weston, Hertfordshire and is an independent event created by the Cherry farming families.