Funding Success – Nutragy Unlocking the Way to Sustainable Fertilisers

Stopford, in partnership with academic, industrial and farming collaborators, has been awarded funding from Defra’s Farming Innovation Programme (FIP) in Nutrient Management to scale-up production of a disruptive sustainable fertiliser technology.

Nutragy is an eco-friendly process, that upgrades low-value residues from the bioenergy industry into high-value fertiliser products, providing a truly circular approach to crop nutrition.

With a chemical and physical specification akin to that of mineral fertilisers, which are energy intensive to produce, Stopford envisages Nutragy can be used as a low-carbon alternative to mineral fertilisers.

This innovation project will establish a demonstration-scale Nutragy manufacturing facility alongside a biogas plant, with further Nutragy crop efficacy trials to be conducted in co-located polytunnels.

The collaborative project will see the technology’s inventor Dr. Ben Herbert, Director of Technology & Innovation at Stopford Ltd, work alongside colleagues from Lancaster University, Cockerham Green Energy Ltd, Recycled Crop Nutrients Ltd and Ralymi Dairy Ltd to fast-track the scale-up and exploitation of Nutragy.

Dr. Ben Herbert said: “I am delighted that our Nutragy technology has been recognised by UKRI’s and Defra’s FIP Challenge as a groundbreaking technology to enhance the sustainability of food production, and I very much look forward to working with our project partners to achieve our mutual ambitions of enabling a truly circular approach to crop nutrition.”

Prof. Ian Dodd, Professor of Sustainable Agriculture at Lancaster University commented: “In previous greenhouse-based pot trials with a range of crop species, Nutragy offered comparable or better plant growth than urea. This project’s ambition of scaling-up manufacture allows us to evaluate Nutragy’s performance over a typical crop rotation. Having worked with Stopford for several years it’s exciting to continue this journey that brings the product closer to market.”

Chris Parry, CEO at Cockerham Green Energy added: “Nutragy presents a great opportunity to enhance the value of by-products from the bioenergy industry – with my farming background engaging in the production and distribution of sustainable fertiliser products has always been an ambition’ 

The FIP funding, which is a partnership with and delivered by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, seeks to support the investigation of solutions that have the potential to improve sustainability, productivity and resilience of UK farming on a path to net-zero.