By Harry Langford, Innovation Director at the UK Agri-Tech Centre, who shares his thoughts on the event.
The Northern CEA Symposium brought together growers, researchers, technologists and agri-tech businesses in Sheffield with a shared focus on turning innovation in controlled environment agriculture into solutions for commercial growers.
Across the day, presentations explored practical challenges facing the sector, from nutrient efficiency and water use to substrates, sensing and circular inputs. The emphasis was consistently on application, including how technologies might reduce costs, improve control, and operate reliably in real production environments.
New approaches to sensing and monitoring were discussed as a way to give operators clearer, faster feedback on crop performance, helping them make decisions with greater confidence. Substrate innovation also featured, reflecting growing pressure to move beyond traditional materials while maintaining consistency at scale. Alongside this, approaches to reduce the energy footprint of CEA were tabled and their economics explored.
What stood out was the openness of the community, with speakers acknowledging the need for further testing, integration and validation, reinforcing the importance of environments where technologies can be trialled under realistic conditions and assessed against commercial priorities.
Our involvement
The UK Agri-Tech Centre took part in the symposium, organised by UK Urban AgriTech and the University of Sheffield, to share how we support CEA innovation through test, trial and demonstration and how our new Greenhouse to Global programme is supporting innovative CEA technologies to scale.
Too often, promising technologies struggle to move beyond pilot scale because they lack credible, independent evidence of performance in commercially representative environments. We outlined how our programme supports SMEs working across sensing, substrates, lighting and control and how we are testing these technologies together to produce commercial case studies for specific industry use cases.
The companies we spotlighted
Through the ACDC spinach production case study, we showcased how Ostara, Fotenix and Vertically Urban are working together to address core challenges in vertical farming: consistent quality, reduced energy use and reduced labour costs. The case study collectively illustrates how integrated control, crop monitoring and tuneable lighting can support more responsive, dataled growing decisions, saving 25% in energy use.
We also featured GyroPlant and its substrate-free approach, overviewing the work that we have done with them on both leafy green production and strawberry propagation, to reduce the reliance on unsustainable substrates whilst maintaining performance at commercial scale.
Throughout the day, the research and development presented demonstrated how collaboration can help CEA innovation progress from early ideas into solutions that can be adopted across the sector.
Alongside the technical discussions, UK Urban AgriTech also used the symposium to float a thought-provoking idea: the potential for a cross-CEA umbrella organisation that better represents the full breadth of controlled environment production in the UK. The concept was framed around bringing together sectors, from crops to mushrooms, insects and seaweed, to improve knowledge transfer and engage more proactively with policy development. Again, this reiterates the importance of the sector working together to maximise the potential of CEA in the UK.
