Innovation For An Agricultural Revolution

‘Innovation For An Agricultural Revolution’ is the theme for Agri-Tech East's annual conference, REAP, which this year will be held on 9th November at the Wellcome Genome Campus Conference Centre. Inspirational speakers will describe how technology drawn from other sectors and radical new thinking has the power to create transformational change for agriculture.

Together we are looking beyond the current situation of incremental improvements to explore how to make the step-change that will revolutionise the industry.

Highlights of REAP

• Keynote speaker Gary Zimmer of Midwestern BioAg is a pioneer of ‘biological farming’; his strategies for creating and maintaining healthy soils have increased yields by over 50%.
• Technologists from Bayer, BT, Fujitsu, Lockheed Martin and PA Consulting will highlight innovations from other sectors and geographies that have potential to provide radical improvements.
• Is there a third way? Professor Sir David Baulcombe, head of the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, will discuss with farmer Jim Godfrey OBE the latest advances in plant science that promise a disruptive impact on current agricultural practices.
• Emerging Agri-Tech – early career scientists talk about their industry-facing research: nitrogen availability from soil to crop, sensing late blight before it infects, using controlled traffic farming to move bales, and next-generation crop analysis from mobile phones to mobile aircraft.
• The popular ‘Start-up Showcase’ will feature some of agri-tech's most exciting entrepreneurs looking to work with partners and pilot new technologies, ranging from crop and disease diagnostics, robotic harvesting, soil-less cropping and using informatics for better on-farm decision making.
• Technology demonstrations – hands-on demonstrations of robotics, prototype disease prediction systems and an Uber approach to drones – tech that will radically change the way we look at managing diseases.

Find out more at bit.ly/REAP-2016

REAP 2016 is kindly sponsored by Anglia Farmers, AHDB Cereals & Oilseeds, BBSRC, Greater Cambridge Greater Peterborough Enterprise Partnership, New Anglia Local Enterprise Partnership, Norwich Research Park, Rothamsted Centre for Research and Enterprise, and SmithsonHill.