OPINION: The barrier to agritech adoption in Scotland isn’t technology – it’s time

By Steve Maclaren, Chief Operating Officer at the National Robotarium. Originally published in The Herald Business HQ on 2 April 2026.

Earlier this year , I sat in a room in Inverness with a group of potato farmers. One of them had driven four hours to be there. He wasn’t there because he was curious about robotics in the abstract. He was there because grading, roguing, and soil sampling are grinding his business down, and he wanted to know whether technology could help. What struck me most was not what he said, but what he asked for at the end. Not a robot, not a grant, not a pilot scheme. He asked for someone he could trust to tell him whether any of it would actually work on his farm before he committed a penny.

That conversation – repeated in different forms across three workshops the National Robotarium ran with Highlands and Islands Enterprise last year, covering crop and arable farmers, livestock farmers and potato growers – tells you something important about where Scotland’s agritech adoption challenge actually sits.

It is not a technology problem. The solutions exist. Vision systems for crop monitoring and disease detection. Automated grading tables. Robotic cleaning systems for livestock sheds. None of these are hypothetical. Farmers across the north of Scotland and beyond know this. Many are already adopting automation where they can. Our nation’s farming community isn’t stuck in the past, but it is, in large part, stuck in a risk calculation that no one has yet helped it solve.

Investment in unproven technology is a gamble not just with this year’s profit, but with the long-term viability of a family business; land that is meant to pass to the next generation, not to be written down in a bad technology bet. Farmers have told us, consistently, that they will act on word of mouth from someone they trust who has already done the trialling and the verification. What they cannot afford is the time to do that work themselves.

And that is crucial. Time – not money and not scepticism – is the critical blocker. An HIE-funded conference I attended in February, where I shared the workshop findings with a broader group of farmers, validated this directly. Unlike potato growers, who have visible early adopters to learn from, livestock and crop farmers said they could not identify any trailblazers in their sectors to follow. Without a trusted peer who has already taken the risk, most are not willing to go first. That is a rational response to operating on tight margins in a challenging environment. It is not a failure of ambition.

The question, then, is what government and public bodies should do about it. And the answer is not more awareness-raising. It is not another information leaflet or another conference. It is the systematic creation of the capacity that farmers currently lack: the time and access to independent expertise to assess, trial and verify whether a given technology will work in their specific conditions before a single pound is committed.

We know what that looks like in practice, because we have seen it work elsewhere. Denmark’s Odense Robotics cluster – home to more than 160 companies and one of the models the National Robotarium itself drew from – is the product of deliberate, sustained public investment in shared infrastructure and independent expertise. The Basque Country’s Robotekin ecosystem has built a physical testing environment where companies and end users can prototype, validate and demonstrate solutions in realistic conditions before scaling. Both operate on the same principle that you remove the risk from the adoption decision by ensuring that the hard work of verification has already been done.

Scotland has both the need and, increasingly, the assets to build something equivalent for agriculture. The case for a regional robotics assessment and testing facility in the Highlands that can evaluate technologies in conditions that reflect real Scottish farming environments, offer independent expert guidance, and act as the trusted intermediary is not speculative. It is grounded in direct, structured conversation with the sector itself. Farmers with livestock and arable operations travelled long distances tell us they want this. Many followed up after our workshops asking how to take the next step.

The good news is that investment is currently flowing into the Inverness region. HIE has existing funding mechanisms, including a Digital Specialist Advice Grant and a Digital and Technology Adoption Capital Grant, that could support individual adoption decisions. The UK Government’s Robotics Adoption Hubs Network funding creates an opportunity for Scotland to put forward a focused, coordinated bid that establishes Inverness as a node in a national adoption infrastructure while ensuring the facility is designed around the specific conditions of Highland and Island farming.

With a Holyrood election approaching, parties across the chamber have a clear opportunity to commit to an agritech adoption framework that meets that standard. The evidence base is there. The demand is there. The international models exist. What Scotland needs now is the political will to build the infrastructure that turns farmer interest into farmer confidence – and farmer confidence into adoption.

That is what the farmer who drove four hours to Inverness was asking for. It should not be a difficult ask to answer.