Agriculture & Space: The UK Landscape & Beyond

In January 2020, the Satellite Applications Catapult published a detailed document which included 195 companies from across various sectors: outlining their products, services, and capability. The UK Space Capabilities Catalogue (UKSCC) creates an image of the UK landscape by highlighting some of the best of UK expertise and capability to increase the visibility of the UK Space Sector, both domestically and internationally, as well as the periphery organisations that engage with the sector. One complimentary sector which features heavily is Agriculture.

Since January, the UKSCC has increased to 272 businesses, 40 of which have an Agriculture focus. These businesses vary from solo entrepreneurs and start-ups – 1 to 10 employee enterprises – to large, 250+ organisations, creating a broad depth of representation and capability from crop health to land monitoring, horticulture to arable, pastoral, and mixed farming.

Importantly, it also highlights some of the excellent Centres of Excellence and universities creating focal points of activity linking the science base with large industry and SMEs around the UK, and in turn, bridging the gap between Agriculture and Space enabled applications; an area the UK is recognised for globally across disciplines such as crop and livestock genetics, Agri-engineering, nutrition, and environmental sciences.

However, we can always do better to understand how Agriculture and Space can and could intertwine, to better map the distribution across the UK of clusters, supply chains, as well as the many institutions, including agricultural colleges, universities, and private organisations invested in Agricultural-Technology. By increasing the visibility of the capabilities of UK space companies we hope to stimulate future collaborations and new business as well as innovative new solutions for customers and end-users.

Please click here to visit the UK Space Capabilities Catalogue. If you would like to be involved in the UKSCC, please complete this form.