Six projects will share £438,000 from the Scottish Government for innovation in farming and food production.

  • SRUC/SAC – Grampian Growers Tuberzone Project: £74,712

    • Setting up an organisational group to introduce new processes, utilise new technologies in one part of the seed potato sector, and encourage farmers to adopt new practices.

  • SRUC/SAC – DLT/Blockchain system for gluten-free oats: £97,466

    • Funding a digital ledger to be used to monitor gluten-free oats. Through this network, the producer can provide reliable traceability and provenance, as well as irrefutable evidence that their oats are genuinely gluten-free, produced to the highest standards and fundamentally improve supply chains.

  • SRUC/SAC – Feeding for fertility in the suckler herd: £74,429

    • This project will assess the nutritional status of the suckler cows both pre-calving and post-calving, and link this with changes to body condition scores and fertility.

  • SAOS – Livestock performance programme: £60,873

    • The aim of this project is to increase the resilience and production efficiency of the Scottish suckler herd by piloting the use of ScotEID data to calculate key management decisions on a day-to-day basis, thus improving the herds’ performance, profitability and environmental efficiency.

  • SAOS – Beef marbling in a high-value supply chain: £49,033

    • The project aims to enable producers to use new techniques to identify the best beef animals in a herd for each customer-specific supply chain.

  • Wholesome Pigs Ltd – PRRS elimination in pigs: £81,314

    • This is to pilot the elimination of Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS) from the Moray Coast and refine the techniques that can be applied to the rest of the country.