The Great Exhibition 2026: robots and ag-tech in Lincoln

If you missed the Great Exhibition 2026, it's worth knowing what actually went on at the Lincolnshire Showground last month. The event ran on Wednesday 21 October, from 09:30 to 15:00, and was free to get into, so it was easy to bring the whole family along for the day. The venue, also known as The Epic Centre, is over at Grange-de-Lings, LN2 2NA, and the whole thing was put together by Mayor Dame Andrea Jenkyns of Greater Lincolnshire, who stands with Reform UK. This was only the second year the exhibition has run, following an inaugural event last year, and it was built around three themes: We Feed, on food production and ag-tech; We Power, on energy security and infrastructure; and We Protect, on defence, security and advanced manufacturing. The idea was to put the region's pioneering businesses, agricultural producers and technical innovators front and centre.

The robots were the obvious draw. There were speaking and dancing robots about the place, including a humanoid called Luka that acted as presenter, and visitors were ferried around the site on a driverless bus from the company Ohmio. On the farming side, there were weeding and strawberry-harvesting machines developed at Lincoln's Institute for Agri-Food Technology, which ties into the work being done at Lincoln Agri-Robotics, the world's first global centre of excellence in agricultural robotics over at the University of Lincoln's Riseholme Park campus. The university has also secured £4.8 million to set up the HARVEST hub, an Innovate UK-funded Robotics Adoption Hub with its own test track at Riseholme Park, so the machines on show were far from a one-off.

It pulled in a fair bit of attention from outside the county, too. Delegations from twelve countries attended, including the USA, Taiwan, Poland, Bangladesh, Canada and Lithuania, and more than 1,000 business leaders, investors, policymakers and international representatives turned up. The speaker list was an eclectic one: former Prime Minister Liz Truss spoke about alternatives and gave her support to Bitcoin, Newark Reform MP Robert Jenrick was there, and a Texan describing himself as the 'Carbon King' also took the stage.

For anyone wondering about the venue itself, the Lincolnshire Showground is owned by the Lincolnshire Agricultural Society, a registered charity, and sits on 270 acres of outdoor event land. The Epic Centre is its award-winning eco-friendly indoor space, 1,836 square metres of custom-built hall that can hold up to 1,200 people, with 1,000 car spaces and ten coach spaces on site. The exhibition hall cost taxpayers just under £70,000 the previous year, with the Lincoln and District Trades Council putting the figure at £69,237.74, offset by £23,750 in private-sector cash sponsorship and roughly £5,000 in in-kind sponsorship. Whether it's back next year is one thing to keep an eye on, but for now, it's a good example of the kind of ag-tech and robotics coming out of Lincoln.