Are TRL’s “Tailored for Real Life” agriculture – or is it time for a change?

Going beyond R & D

Many of the conversations have referred to the need for not just R (Research) and D (Development) but also E (Extension), A (Adoption) and S (Scale). All have different drivers, motivations and require very different expertise and levels of support. When lamenting the lack of academic spin-outs that have reached commercial viability, to expect everything to sit within a University or research institute are, to say the least, ambitious.

Currently the UK government is supporting the “A” through its ADOPT programme and the pilot Agri-Scale initiative is an acknowledgement of the challenges encountered in growing a business. So that’s the “S” (hopefully) taken care of – at least in agri-automation.

But why has the “E” – Extension – become, at best, an old-fashioned word in UK agriculture? Internationally, it’s often the bridge between an evolving innovation and building confidence among farmers to adopt a tech, tool or practice.

Hence the need for the joined-up agri-tech innovation ecosystem. It is a big ask to expect the Research – which is about generating knowledge – to seamlessly segue into the Development – which is about finding a market fit to address customer needs bringing in the farmers’ views and input.

And arguably there’s another initial-based problem to contend with.

Is it time to move beyond TRLs in agri-tech?

The “Technology Readiness Level” (TRL) system was originally developed by NASA in the 1970s for space hardware. It gives a simple, standardised, and structured scale of 1 to 9, from early research (1), to proven in an operational environment (9). Usually Research is TRL 1-3, and Development can be anything from 4 to 8.

It has come to be the universal mechanism by which governments, research institutions, funders and innovation systems have described technology maturity and potential proximity to market.

But does it really apply in the diverse, biological systems within which agriculture operates? It works best where systems are engineered, controlled, and predictable and testing environments can be replicated. It also assumes that an innovation moves in a linear way from the lab to a prototype which is then validated and deployed. And going back to Andrew Bait’s point – the TRL system doesn’t take into account farmer trust, behavioural adoption, or the economic variability under seasonal, real world conditions.

Nor does it consider regulatory risks.

Admittedly it provides a helpful common language for the innovation community to understand and simplifies cross-sector comparisons. It also demonstrates the likely time (and money) needed for commercial deployment and can also give a sense of the number of validation hurdles that have been overcome.

But increasingly it seems a less-than-ideal way of describing the evolution of technologies being developed for agriculture.