A decade after its launch as part of the UK Government’s £140 million Agri-Tech Strategy, Agrimetrics - the UK’s flagship agri-data centre - appears to have stalled. Despite millions in public funding, it failed to deliver a national farm data platform to drive productivity and sustainability gains across the industry. With government grants coming to an end and ongoing operations uncertain, its unfulfilled promise raises serious questions about accountability and missed opportunity. The challenge now is to reclaim that original vision: a national, open and trusted data ecosystem serving farmers, researchers, policymakers, and consumers alike, writes former Niab chief executive Professor Tina Barsby.

 

It is almost exactly ten years to the day since life sciences minister George Freeman MP and farming minister George Eustice MP formally opened the new Agrimetrics Centre on 27 October 2015.

 

Agrimetrics was one of four Centres for Agricultural Innovation created under the UK Government’s £140 million Agri-Tech Strategy. The other three – CHAP, CIEL and Agri-EPI Centre - have since merged to form the UK Agri-Tech Centre, which still receives core public funding despite early expectations that all the centres would become self-financing through research contracts and private-sector partnerships.

 

The centres for innovation were launched amid projections that they would help to bolster food security, reduce carbon footprints, enhance productivity and translate agricultural innovation into commercial success. As I have previously argued, however, a flawed funding model meant the centres did not really move the needle on these ambitious goals. Restricting their ability to invest in anything other than equipment, capital and basic running costs made the centres entirely dependent on attracting investment from commercial partners, rather than delivering against clear, strategic objectives in the national interest. But Agrimetrics was never subject to that rule, and was allowed to invest in people and programmes as well as infrastructure.  

 

Agrimetrics was expected to achieve financial independence within four years. Its first accounts confidently stated:

 

“The Company received government funding from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) to cover the costs of establishing the company and the data platform. The Company has a Grant Funding Agreement with BIS to provide funding for the first 4 years of its operation to allow the company time to achieve financial independence.”  

 

That independence never materialised. Far from becoming self-supporting, Agrimetrics continued to rely on successive government grants. Now, since March 2025, those funding streams appear to have run dry - and with them, perhaps, the project itself.

 

For several weeks, the main Agrimetrics website has been inaccessible — a disconcerting sign for an IT-based organisation. Yet the company remains listed at Companies House as an active not-for-profit entity. No announcement has been made about its status or future direction.

 

Has Agrimetrics quietly reached the end of the road? If so, one must also ask why a parallel entity, Agrimetrics Trading Company Limited, was established as recently as June 2024? This raises awkward questions. Agrimetrics was set up with public money to act as a national data hub - supporting productivity, efficiency and sustainability across British agriculture. Yet the formation of a separate private limited company suggests an attempt to spin-off a very well-funded public asset into a private venture. Again, no announcement has been made about its status or future direction.

 

Tens of millions of pounds have been invested in Agrimetrics since 2015. What exactly has been delivered in return? Has Innovate UK, which was ultimately responsible for Agrimetrics, delivered value for money? British taxpayers deserve transparency and accountability.

 

At its launch, the Government hailed Agrimetrics as a flagship £11.8 million investment that would make the UK a world leader in agricultural data science. The aim was to enable the integration and interoperability of software tools and datasets, providing consistent, national-scale analytics to drive productivity and sustainability improvements on individual farms.

 

“Using Big Data will give the agricultural sector the evidence-based edge,” declared Ian Meikle, then Head of Agriculture and Food at Innovate UK. “The insights from this can drive productivity and growth, benefitting the economy and consumers.”

 

At the time, as chief executive of Niab, one of Agrimetrics’ four founding partners, I shared that enthusiasm. Farms, research institutes and agri-food companies were generating vast quantities of data on yields, inputs, soils and management systems. Satellites and sensors promised to revolutionise the collection of this information. But without a centralised, trusted system to collate and analyse it, much of its potential value was being lost.

 

Agrimetrics was established to fill that gap.

 

Alongside Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC), Reading University, and Rothamsted Research, Niab was expected to play a key role - leading on knowledge exchange and outreach to farmers. Reading and Rothamsted would host and develop the data-science infrastructure.

 

In practice, things worked out rather differently. The original farm-data platform never truly emerged. Niab and the other founding partners saw little of the initial £11.8 million or subsequent public investment as Agrimetrics’ focus shifted away from national data integration towards consultancy and commercial services.

 

That change of direction was undoubtedly driven by the expectation that the centres would become financially independent, but it undermined the founding public-good mission. Agrimetrics became one more consultancy chasing contracts rather than the open, national farm data resource the Agri-Tech Strategy had envisaged.

 

Even George Freeman, who championed Agrimetrics from the start, has since expressed regret. Writing in February 2024, he reflected:

 

“As Life Sciences Minister, I went out on a limb to insist that metrics and data should be a thematic focus for the centres of innovation under the 2013 UK Agri-Tech Strategy. Our vision was to create the evidence base needed to benchmark and track the impact of farm policies, to inform R&D, to drive best-practice improvements in sustainable production, and to provide information to consumers about the sustainability impact of their food choices. It is a perennial source of disappointment to me that this did not transpire. Instead, Agrimetrics appears to have focused on developing a consultancy operation, rather than providing a service of benefit to the country as a whole.”

 

His words echo the frustration felt by many across the agricultural research community. Ten years on, UK agriculture still lacks an integrated national data infrastructure. Research institutions, government agencies and farm businesses continue to operate in silos, with their data fragmented and under-utilised.

 

UK agriculture today faces enormous challenges: meeting growing food demand while cutting emissions, reducing waste, protecting soils, and conserving biodiversity. Effective policy and innovation need robust, outcome-based datasets that link farm-level realities to these national and global challenges. The opportunity cost of Agrimetrics’ drift away from its original mission is therefore profound. A functioning national platform could by now have enabled benchmarking of sustainability metrics, supported more evidence-based farm policies, and provided greater transparency to consumers about the environmental footprint of different foods.

 

Meanwhile, the lack of a centralised, national approach has given rise to a number of competing platforms and carbon footprinting tools providing farm-level “sustainability” assessments. However, Defra-commissioned research conducted by ADAS has revealed significant differences in the methodologies and results behind these assessments, giving rise to suggestions that it has created a distorted market for sustainability tools depending on which one is likely to best suit a particular farming business or system.

 

The UK now lags behind other countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark, USA and New Zealand, where integrated farm-data systems underpin policy, research and innovation. Indeed, the US-based Field to Market programme is now sufficiently embedded within the agri-food industry and trusted by USDA for it to be used as a platform for the delivery of outcomes-based federal grant programmes for climate smart agriculture.      

 

The need that gave rise to Agrimetrics in the first place has not gone away - indeed it has become more urgent. To meet net-zero goals, improve resource use efficiency, and enhance food security, the UK must embed a consistent, harmonised approach to the integration of farm-level data and sustainability metrics at the heart of farming and land use policies.

 

The challenge now is to reclaim that original vision: a national, open and trusted data ecosystem serving farmers, researchers, policymakers, and consumers alike. Only then will the ambition that launched Agrimetrics a decade ago in 2015 finally deliver on its promise.

Professor Tina Barsby OBE is a plant geneticist and a former CEO of Niab, where she led the integration of East Malling research into NIAB as well as the implementation of innovative approaches to plant breeding, including the first public-good wheat breeding programme in the UK since the privatisation of the Plant Breeding Institute in 1987. She was awarded an Honorary Professorship in Agricultural Botany by the University of Cambridge in 2021.