The UK's agri-tech sector risks holding back new farm technology by demanding "perfect" evidence before it reaches commercial farms, Defra's chief scientific adviser, Professor Anjali Goswami, told the 2026 REAP conference organised by Agri-TechE.
Goswami warned against "paralysis by perfection". Not every evidence gap is critical, she said, and researchers, investors, advisers and farmers need a shared idea of what counts as good enough evidence to move from a promising idea to practical use. "Different parts of the ecosystem will always have different thresholds for what counts as 'good enough', but they need a shared understanding of the evidence required," she said.
Her remarks come as the government's Farming Roadmap puts technology, innovation and data at the centre of future productivity and land-use decisions. She pointed to Defra analysis of acute shocks, chronic pressures and structural weaknesses facing farming, and organisers noted that after extreme summers in 2025 and 2026, with another El Niño-influenced summer forecast, there is little time to lose.
Farmers at the conference said results on real farms decide adoption. Kathryn Wright of Wright Farm Produce said growers need to see a technology working commercially, and Jack Smith of Waldersey Farms said it must still work "at 5pm on a wet Friday in November". James Miller, chief executive of the weeding-robot maker Earth Rover, said farmers look first for payback on the investment, then for a fit with how the farm already works and data that is useful, and ask whether the supplier will still exist in five years.
The conference also showed how hard scaling is. Of nearly 90 early-stage companies shown in its Start-Up Showcase over 13 years, 55 are still active or have been acquired, together raising more than £340 million, which suggests more than 40 per cent no longer operate independently. This year's seven included Number8 Bio (methane-reducing cattle feed), BugBiome (microbial crop protection), BindBridge (AI-designed crop-protection molecules), Agribot (satellite analytics), BugBug (acoustic pest monitoring), Hazard Evaluation (chemical risk) and AgroSustain (food waste).
Delegates welcomed a higher cap of £200,000 per project in Defra's ADOPT programme, which helps farmers produce real-world evidence on new technology. Professor Cristobal Uauy, director of the John Innes Centre, suggested describing innovations by development stage, as medicine does with "pre-clinical" and "clinical", and said good enough evidence is what the next stage needs. David Coop of Elsoms urged delegates to make "the evidence you seek proportionate to the decisions you need to make."
Reported by Oliver Morrison for AgNavigator.
Source: AgNavigator
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