Kit Franklin

Kit Franklin is a Chartered Agricultural Engineer, part time Senior Engagement Fellow in the Engineering Department at Harper Adams University and current President Elect of the Institution of Agricultural Engineers (IAgrE).

His expertise covers a range of topics from mechanical design to precision farming and automation. Kit’s “future farming systems” work led to the ground-breaking and headline-grabbing world first ‘Hands Free Hectare’ project, which established and harvested a cereal crop using autonomous machinery in 2017 and then grew to become the 35ha Hands Free Farm for which he was Principal Investigator. Kit has also led multiple other projects under the Hands Free name in collaboration with companies and funders both nationally (UK) and internationally.

Kit has become a revered conference and public speaker through the dissemination of his work at events globally. The Hands Free projects have won multiple awards and Kit was named a “Rising Star” of UK agriculture by the Farmers Weekly in 2017 and then awarded the IAgrE Presidents Award in 2021 for outstanding progress as a mid-career engineer.

He co-chairs IAgrE’s Robotics Special Interest Group and is a member of BSI Technical Subcommittee AGE/6/4, developing BS 8646, “Use of crop robots in agriculture and horticulture – Code of practice”. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Agricultural Society of England and has fed into their Farm of the Future initiative. 

Kit attained his CEng with IAgrE in early 2022.