Anglian Water Farming Innovation Grant: Up to £7,500 for Farmers

A four-week window for your own idea

Anglian Water’s Farming Innovation Grant opened on 1st November and closes on 29th November 2026. It is a short window, and it rewards applicants who have already thought about what they want to try.

This is the scheme’s seventh round. Over the previous six it has supported 260 applicants, backing projects worth more than £3.7 million and influencing an area of over 118,000 hectares. That track record matters for two reasons: the scheme is well established enough to be worth the effort of applying, and it is well known enough to be genuinely competitive.

What separates it from most capital grants is that there is no options list. Anglian Water is not publishing a menu of approved items and inviting you to pick from it. The scheme asks what you want to try on your own farm to reduce the risk of soil, nutrients or pesticides reaching raw water — and then asks you to make the case for it. The organising idea is connectivity: the pathway between land and water. Break or slow that pathway, or change the management practice feeding it, and you reduce risk at source.

What’s on offer

The headline figure is up to £7,500 per holding. A few points behind that number are worth understanding before you start costing a project.

In previous rounds the grant has been match-funded. Anglian Water has not funded 100% of a project, and applications requesting more than half the total cost have been unlikely to succeed. In practice that has meant budgeting on the basis that you fund at least half yourself — so a £7,500 request implies a project of around £15,000 or more. Treat the grant as the part that makes a worthwhile project viable, not as the whole budget.

The cap applies per business rather than per application. You can submit more than one idea within the window, but combined funding to any one business has been limited to the same £7,500 ceiling. Cluster groups have been able to bid as a whole for shared kit or services, with individual members still free to submit their own applications alongside, assessed on their own merits.

Payment has typically come on completion, once pre-agreed evidence has been submitted — usually a paid invoice, photographs, or both. A schedule appropriate to the project can be agreed, but plan on funding the spend up front and claiming afterwards.

What it funds

Previous projects have fallen into ten broad categories, which give a sense of the territory without narrowing it:

• Soil health and resilience
• Nutrient management
• Organic materials management
• Pesticide management
• Livestock management
• Precision farming
• Water resource management
• Out of production
• Natural flood management
• Other

The measures actually funded are more revealing than the categories. Successful applications have covered direct drills, low disturbance subsoilers, strip till cultivators, fertiliser spreaders with section control, precision fertiliser measures, water bowsers with an integrated drinking trough, and the development of robotic weeding technology.

Two things stand out from that list. The first is that second-hand equipment is explicitly welcome — buying pre-used kit has been treated as good value rather than a weakness in an application, which stretches a £7,500 contribution considerably further. The second is that the projects range from straightforward kit purchases to genuine development work, so the bar for innovation is innovation on your farm, not a world first.

What it won’t fund. Projects that have already started are out: the funding is for new work and must be agreed before anything begins. General farm infrastructure such as concreting a yard has been turned down on the grounds that it does not demonstrate innovation and that other funding streams suit it better. Rainwater harvesting has been treated the same way. If a project is essentially maintenance or compliance, this is the wrong scheme for it.

Are you in a priority catchment?

Budget is limited, so applications are invited from the Anglian Water drinking water catchments currently prioritised for this round. Anyone farming or managing land in the Anglian Water region can apply, but projects inside a priority focus area are materially more likely to succeed.

Spend five minutes with the catchment map before you spend an afternoon on an application. Find your holding, and if it sits inside a highlighted catchment, click it: Anglian Water publishes the specific local challenges it wants solutions to in that catchment. Writing your application against the named challenge for your own area is the single most useful thing you can do with that five minutes.

If you are outside a targeted area but have an idea you think could benefit both agriculture and the water sector, it is still worth a conversation with your nearest catchment advisor rather than writing the idea off.

What makes a strong application

Every bid is assessed by an independent panel against a standard set of criteria, which means you are writing for someone who does not know your farm. The published criteria translate into some practical advice:

• Be specific about connectivity — name the watercourse, reservoir or borehole, say how far it is and describe how water actually moves off that land. Do not leave the panel to infer the pathway.
• Answer the local challenge — use the wording Anglian Water publishes for your catchment and show how your project answers it.
• Quantify the risk reduction — give hectares influenced, quantities and rates rather than adjectives. Scale of risk reduction is scored, and numbers score better than enthusiasm.
• Say how you will share what you learn — learning opportunity and potential to expand carry weight. Offer something concrete: hosting a visit, sharing yield or soil data, reporting back to a cluster group.
• Ask for a sensible share — the funds you request are weighed against your own contribution and any previous Anglian Water support. A proportionate ask with real skin in the game reads better than a maximum one.
• Show the benefit lasts — delivery timescale and length of benefit are both assessed. A measure that keeps working well beyond the funding year is worth more than a one-season trial.
• Cost it properly — get quotes, break the costs down and justify them from both sides. This is where second-hand kit genuinely helps your case.
• Define the innovation — explain what you do now, what you would do instead, and why it is untested on your ground. New to your farm is enough.

Key dates

• Applications open: 1st November 2026
• Applications close: 29th November 2026
• Decisions confirmed: January 2027
• Evidence submission deadline: 31st July 2027, or by arrangement with your local Anglian Water catchment advisor

Applications are made through an online form, with the application questions, terms and conditions and FAQs all published alongside it. Download the application questions first and draft your answers offline — the form is not somewhere you want to be composing a project description from scratch at the end of the month.

Thinking about applying?

A competitive grant with a four-week window and a free-form brief is exactly the sort of thing that gets put off until it is too late. If you have an idea and are not sure whether it fits, or you want help sizing the project, pulling the costings together and making the case to the panel, talk to our team here.