What is the SLIMERS project?
Slugs are major economic pests causing £43.5M crop damage/annum for wheat and oilseed rape in the UK. Traditionally, chemical slug management relied on metaldehyde/methiocarb, however, these actives were banned in the UK due to their impact on the environment.
The SLIMERS project aims to significantly impact the UK economy, increase yields, productivity and sustainability and help meet net zero targets through enhanced digital autonomous slug monitoring, forecasting and control.
SLIMERS builds on previous work and combines expertise across the consortium, to develop:
- Cost-effective digital autonomous slug monitoring and spot treatment
- Slug forecasting and precision application tools
- The knowledge and understanding to control slugs more sustainably.
Project partners
British On-Farm Innovation Network (BOFIN)
BOFIN is a growing network of farmers, scientists, researchers and citizen scientists, enabling farmers to lead agricultural innovation through on-farm trials, collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Within the SLIMERS project, BOFIN recruits, trains and supports Slug Sleuths –farmers capturing slug data from their fields, with some trialling ‘slug resistant’ wheat varieties. BOFIN also coordinate Slug Scouts – volunteers who send grey field slugs to the SLIMERS scientists for research, including feeding trials.
BOFIN is also responsible for the dissemination of findings, sharing insights, results and best practice with the Slug Circle and wider farming community through events, webinars, press, knowledge guides, videos and social media activity.
Agrivation
Agrivation is proud to be a key delivery partner in the SLIMERS project, supporting the development of a data-driven understanding of slug activity in relation to soil texture and its impact on crop emergence across diverse soil types. Leveraging expertise in precision agriculture, soil science and field data capture, Agrivation is designing and implementing robust, scalable field monitoring and mapping systems to understand soil texture and nutritional variability—and how these influence slug pressure and crop development.
Core contributions to the project include:
- Site Selection & Field Trial Design
- Soil Sampling & Mapping
- Automated Monitoring & Data Capture
- Innovation Support & Data Integration
Farmscan AG
Farmscan work closely with manufacturers to deliver high-performance implement controllers, building solutions for sprayers, seed drills and spreaders tailored to the precision agriculture industry.
They are now dramatically advancing their spraying technology with a high-accuracy spot spraying system designed to precisely target slugs, reducing chemical inputs and improving sustainability.
In collaboration with Fotenix, farmscan are integrating multispectral imaging to enable real-time identification and treatment of slugs in a single, intelligent platform.
Harper Adams University
SLIMERS Work package 2 investigates the potential for utilising the known heterogenous distribution of slugs in arable fields to achieve more sustainable pest control, by applying control agents only to patches with higher numbers (leaving other areas untreated).
Building on their extensive work on spatio-temporal stability of these patches, Harper Adams University leads/delivers research investigating the underpinning biology governing patch location, and the development of predictive models driven by soil maps taken for other husbandry purposes.
Fotenix
The SLIMERS project is working to identify invasive slug species and create smart maps to guide targeted use of new, more sustainable pesticides. With tougher rules on slug control, growers need sharper tools — not more chemicals. That’s where Fotenix comes in.
Fotenix’s role is to build AI-powered slug detection, right there in the field. But first, we’ve got to train the AI and that means putting slugs in the crosshairs. In early 2025 the team at the UK Agri-Tech Centre scanned slugs across BOFIN’s slug sleuths (early adopter farmers) sites, helping pinpoint the exact spectral signature of these unwelcome visitors.
This labelling approach helps us to build libraries of key pests to allow development of software pipelines that can spot slugs earlier and more accurately than a human or drone scout, a hot topic in pest management across crops.
