Of all the game changing sectors, the UK Food Valley is the most advanced as a concept and is embedded in our landscape and language across political and academic circles.   Greater Lincolnshire has a regional, national, and growing global reputation for the food sector, where we lead the UK production of products as diverse as seafood, fresh produce, poultry, and ornamental crops. 

We launched the UK Food Valley in late 2021, to support the growth of the industry with major investments in production, skills, innovation, low carbon, and technology. As a direct result to that, investment enquiries doubled last year, and our leadership on automation, led by the Lincoln Institute of Agri Tech team, is now recognised as world-leading by government, in both skills and robotics.

Since 2016, we have seen an incredible £70m invested in new agrifood skills and infrastructure, including Bishop Burton’s showground campus, the University of Lincoln’s Riseholme Campus, the National Centre for Food Manufacturing in Holbeach, the Lincolnshire Institute of Technology, and more recently the Centre for Food and Fresh Produce Logistics in Boston. 

The recent launch of the South Lincolnshire Food Enterprise Zone Hub has created a landmark development promoting collaboration for small or start-up businesses in the food and drink sector and has successfully attracted key tenants.

We have also secured over £100m of new partnership R&D projects with the food and farming industry, involving 200 partners working on over 110 innovation projects. 

There have been major investments in controlled environment agriculture and greenhouses, and healthy food choices - especially in new plant protein and new cold stores such as Dyson’s 6 ha greenhouse fruit farm, Europe’s largest plant protein factory at Boston, Branston Potatoes’ new plant extracting plant protein from low grade potatoes for use as plant protein.  The interest continues in fish farming and aquaculture, a rapidly emerging sector, with several live planning applications for fin fish and shellfish. 

This year also saw the seafood pilot led by the University of Lincoln successfully providing energy efficiency solutions for the seafood supply chains. The LEP also recently announced the launch of the Toyota partnership project to electrify the fish vans across Grimsby.

We are making sure that our Skills Bootcamp programme is delivering to the sector too.

The food chain, cold stores and greenhouses are all major energy users, but new units are pioneering the use of waste heat from AD plants, biomass heating and even hydrogen and we are beginning to explore geothermal energy for heating.   

Last autumn, we announced that the UK Food Valley has committed to promote the cluster north of Lincoln as the Agricultural Growth Zone (AG Zone) and work continues on this, building on the existing cluster including: the anchor Lincolnshire Agricultural Society Showground home, the Bishop Burton Showground Campus which trains over 500 students on precision agriculture and the rapid growth of the Lincoln Institute of AgriFood Technology at Riseholme with the largest agri-robotics team in Europe, a growing presence in digital food chain technology, and teams working on sustainability and land management.

The cluster also includes the first Barclays Eagle Farm Lab to spearhead national support for SMEs and start-ups in the agritech sector. This is vital to the agricultural transition which is changing how we support farmers and what we expect them to deliver.  It is essential that we equip the sector with new skills and the innovations needed for a sustainable future, and the development will provide a complete skills pipeline from interaction with schools, through further education and undergraduate courses, to post graduate education and CPD.

This high level of commercial investment activity is a key measure of success and shows that the UK Food Valley is leading the way in sustainable food production in the UK.  

We are determined to grow our agri tech, food tech and aquaculture to ensure Lincolnshire is recognised as the UK’s Food Valley, bringing huge opportunity and high skilled jobs, and we look forward to working with you all to deliver this as we push forward with this programme.