Our vision is to maximise the food potential of UK pasture by using targeted chemical processing and novel biotechnology to convert grass into nutritious edible fractions for healthier and more affordable alternative foods, making UK agriculture more resilient and sustainable. Our proposal aims to use novel chemical processing methods to extract the central edible fractions from grass (protein, digestible carbohydrates, vitamins, lipids, fibre) before culturing the yeast Metschnikowia pulcherrima on the cellulosic fraction to produce mycoprotein and a lipid suitable as a palm oil substitute. These ingredients will then be combined in a range of alternative meat and dairy products, displacing environmentally damaging imported ingredients currently used. Further processing of the waste products from the process will produce nutrient rich fertilizers and help create a model for future circular farming economies. When optimised this process would only need 10 to 15kg of fresh grass (20% dry matter content) to produce 1kg of edible food ingredients, of which approximately 25% would be lipid and 35% protein. Whilst not entirely comparable on a nutritional basis this represents a ten-fold increase in productivity compared to cattle raised for meat, or twice the productivity of dairy cows. By converting grass into edible food components, a number of advantages are realised including: - UK produced substitutes for palm oil, soya protein, and other imported food ingredients. This has environmental benefits in the UK and abroad. It will provide UK produced healthy nutritional substitutes for ingredients grown on former rainforest sites, whilst significantly reducing food miles; - Produce UK food substitutes for over two billion pounds worth of annual food imports, with the opportunity to export significant quantities of surplus produce; - Improved UK resilience to climate change as grass is more resilient to flooding and other extreme weather conditions than most other crops; - As the process is feedstock agnostic, it should work equally well with wildflower rich pasture grass. This potentially enables the reintroduction of grasslands with greater biodiversity without having an impact on the grasses usability, an environmentally beneficial by-product of the process; - Providing a commercially viable non-livestock based market for forage production that would also allow arable land that is prone to flooding to profitably return to meadow grass production; - The profitable inclusion of grass in arable rotations to help combat blackgrass and other pesticide resistant weeds; - At present, in some areas it is uneconomic to build and maintain livestock fencing, resulting in grassland in these regions having little commercial agricultural value. These grasslands will now become commercially viable, and contribute to UK food production; - Limited risk in scaling up as there is no need to invest in new farm machinery, existing forage equipment and storage facilities will suffice and the bio-processing technology is mature and already used for many other industrial applications; - Opportunities for investment in a new UK food industry; - With the production of more digestible fractions, this project would produce more sustainable, UK sourced, feed for monogastric livestock; - Initial research suggests that sufficient unutilised grass is available for the P2P process, therefore, this system should have little or no impact on grass supplies for dairy and livestock farming.

Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) technologies are set to transform global industries. Agri-Food is the largest manufacturing sector in the UK, contributing over £38bn GVA to the UK economy and employing 420,000 people. It supports a food chain (primary farming through to retail), which generates a GVA of £108bn, with 3.9m employees in a truly international industry, with £20bn of exports in 2016. The global food chain cannot be taken for granted: it is under pressure from global population growth, climate change, political pressures affecting migration (e.g. Brexit), population drift from rural to urban regions and the demographics of an aging global population in advanced economies. In addition, jobs in the agri-food sector can be physically demanding, conducted in adverse environments and relatively unrewarding. The opportunity for RAS in Agri-Food is compelling - however, large-scale investment in basic underpinning research is required. We propose to create a CDT that focuses on advanced RAS technologies, which will advance the state of the art by creating the largest global cohort of RAS specialists and leaders focused on the Agri-Food sector. This will include 50 PhD scholarships in projects co-designed with industry to give the UK global leadership in RAS across critical and essential sectors of the world economy, expanding the UK's science and engineering base whilst driving industrial productivity and mitigating the environmental and societal impacts of the currently available solutions. In terms of wider impact, the RAS challenges that need to be overcome in the agri-food sector will have further application across multiple sectors involving field robotics and/or robotics in manufacturing. Studying robots for agriculture and food production together allows us to address fundamental challenges in RAS, while delivering whole supply chain efficiencies and synergies across both sides of the farm gate. Core research themes include autonomous mobility in challenging, often GPS-denied and unstructured environments; manipulation and soft robotics for handling delicate and unstructured food products; sensing and image interpretation in challenging agricultural and manufacturing environments; fleet management systems integrating methods for goal allocation, joint motion planning, coordination and control; and 'co-bots' for maintaining safe human-robot collaboration and interaction in farms and factories. All these themes will be applied across a range of applications in agri-food from soil preparation to selective harvesting and on-site grading, through to food processing, manufacturing and supply chain optimisation. The Centre brings together a unique collaboration of leading researchers from the Universities of Lincoln, Cambridge and East Anglia, located at the heart of the UK agri-food business, together with the Manufacturing Technology Centre, supported by leading industrial partners and stakeholders. The wide-scale engagement with industry (£3.0M committed) and end users in the CDT will enable this basic research to be pushed rapidly towards real-world applications in the agri-food industry. An ongoing training programme will take place throughout the CDT, addressing subject-specific and general scientific and technical skills, agriculture and food manufacturing, Responsible Research and Innovation, entrepreneurship, ethics, EDI, and personal and career development. The programme is supported by excellent facilities, including an agri-robotics field centre with a fleet of state-of-the-art agri-robots; a demonstration farm with arable holdings, glasshouses, polytunnels, and livestock; an experimental food factory with robots for food production and intra-logistics; multiple robotics laboratories; advanced robotic manipulators and mobile robots; advanced sensing, imaging and camera technologies; high-performance computing facilities; and excellent links to industrial facilities and test environments.