Awarded Grants
Below is a listing of our awarded grants that tackle big food and agriculture challenges.

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106 Grants found

Dr. James C. Schnable Awarded 2026 NAS Prize in Food & Agriculture Sciences

FFAR Fellows Program 2025 Cohort

FFAR Vet Fellows Seventh Cohort

Dr. Hans Coetzee Awarded 2025 NAS Prize in Food & Agriculture Sciences

Building Agroecosystem Soil Health to Adapt to Climate and Regulatory Realities while Protecting Rural Community Health

Leveraging multi-scale datasets and modeling tools for improved soil health and carbon management

Next-generation Sustainable Weed Management Enabled by Micro-targeted Legged Robots

Exploring Novel Promoter Alleles for Multiple Vitamin Biofortification Using a Calli-Derived Somatic Embryo Platform

Electrochemically Assisted Biological Nitrogen Fixation for Distributed & Sustainable Fertilizer Production

Understanding Plant Parasitic Nematode Virulence Mechanisms: A Valuable Approach to Expedite Breeding Durable & Broad-spectrum Crop Resistance

Novel Biobased Antiviral Treatments for Bee Pollinator Health

Developing Multifunctional & Durable Agro-based Food Packaging to Reduce Toxic Plastic Waste & Sustainably Advance a Bioeconomy

Water & Soil Sustainability for Nutritious Rice Production

Perennial Grain Staple Foods Program

FFAR Fellows Program 2024 Cohort

Major enhancement of U.S. swine industry preparedness and responses to large-scale infectious foreign animal diseases through harmonizing biosecurity plans and advancing interpretable machine learning

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FFAR Vet Fellows Sixth Cohort

FFAR-OCP Disruptive Fertilizer Technology Fellowship First Cohort

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Kirchner Food Fellowship HBCU 2023-2024 Cohort

Kirchner Food Fellowship Inaugural HBCU Cohort (2021-22)

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FFAR Vet Fellows Fifth Cohort

FFAR Vet Fellows Fourth Cohort

FFAR Vet Fellows Third Cohort

FFAR Vet Fellows Second Cohort

FFAR Vet Fellows Inaugural Cohort

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National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food & Agriculture Research: Huaijun Zhou

The Revitalization of Indigenous Crops in the Southwest

Developing circular urban food systems for a rapidly growing desert city

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Big Data to Improve and Sustain Wheat End-Use Quality in the Face of Increasingly Variable Climate Scenarios

Evaluating the use of calcium silicate amendments to manage the bioavailability of organic carbon in agricultural soils

Advancing the Design and Fabrication of Biopolymer-based Nanocomposites for Sustainable Food Packaging

Using a novel RNA therapy to tackle dual threat of tomato spotted wilt virus, a pandemic agricultural pathogen and its supervector, thrips

Harnessing mycorrhizal-microbial synergies for agricultural resilience and health

Establish Power-to-Food by Cultivating and Processing Hydrogenotrophic Single Cells to Design New Sustainable Protein Supply Chains Without Arable Land

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Next-Generation Carbon Capture for Agricultural Crop Applications

Orthogonal Nano-Engineering (ONE) for Rational Design of Food Contact Surfaces

Establishing Viable Organic Orchard Crop Systems for the Northeast U.S.

Kirchner Food Fellowship HBCU 2022-23 Cohort

National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food & Agriculture Research: David Lobell

Recycling nutrients for robust agricultural supply chains

Next-generation phenotyping and genomics for identifying, breeding, and managing more sustainable beef cattle

A Big Data Tool for Urban Tree Crop Selection Under Climate Change

Leveraging Phasic Environment and Nutrient Solution Management to Improve Resource Use Efficiency of Indoor Vertical Farming

Enabling sustainable soil and water management through microbe-powered RF soil sensing

Agroecosystem responses to climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity in the United States and Latin America

Targeted On-Demand Disease Management Practices/Therapies

National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food & Agriculture Research: Rodolphe Barrangou

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Establishing Predictive Genomics to Improve Pollinator Health

Holistic Irrigation Strategies for Climate-Smart Agriculture

Tribal Agriculture Fellowship Inaugural Cohort

Reinvigorating Soybean Yield for 21st Century Agriculture

Understanding the roots of soil health

Enhancing the sustainability of finfish aquaculture to increase production and public acceptance

Digging deeper: Removing the barriers to soil compaction mitigation

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Fermentation to unlock the potential of underutilized Indigenous plants – an integrated traditional ecological knowledge innovation toward bio- and techno-functional benefits

Improving soil health by engineering a rhizobacterium to depend on a plant and stimulate its immune system

Creating a nitrogen fixing symbiont for cereal crops

Advancing Water Policy for Agricultural Sustainability

Building our understanding of soil health practice adoption through knowledge co-production with farmers

National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food & Agriculture Research: Christina Grozinger

National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food & Agriculture Research: Zachary Lippman

Field-deployable biosensors for managing animal health

A Multi-Scale Approach to Unearth the Root of Plant Disease Resistance

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An Integrative Approach to Biofortification of Staple Crops

Uncovering the Genetic Architecture of Inducible Chemical Defenses in Crop and Wild Sunflower for the Sustainable Control of Pests and Pathogens

Engineering crops for cultivation in controlled environments

Developing Novel Strategies for Improved Control and Sustainability of Grapevine Bunch Rot Management

Harnessing the soil microbiome to increase soil health and plant productivity

Kirchner Food Fellowship 2020-21 Cohort

Kirchner Food Fellowship 2019-20 Cohort

Kirchner Food Fellowship 2018-19 Cohort

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Metagenomic Probes for the Rapid Identification of the Microbiome Community in A Wheat Rhizospheremodel System

A Systematic Approach to Improve Heifer Selection and the Sustainability of Beef Production.

Improving the Nutritional Quality of Tomatoes

Harnessing Multi-Trophic Chemical Ecology to Obtain Sustainable Pest Control and Improved Soil Health

National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Research: Elizabeth Ainsworth

Towards Production of Residue-Free Healthy Fruit Crops

Optimizing Water Use in Agriculture by Stacking Conservation Practices

Innovations in the Food Supply Chain to Reduce Food Waste

Harnessing Endophytes to Improve Crop Efficiency and Production

Direct Linkage of Dietary Components with Metabolizers in the Microbiota

Effects of Asymptomatic Listeriosis on Dairy Cattle Fecal Microbiota

Developing CRISPR-Cpf1 Genome Editing Technologies for Crop Improvement

A Coupled Natural-Human System Approach to Solving Locust Plagues

Using Active Organic Matter Tests to Help Predict Crop Nutrient Needs

Plant-Nanoparticle Hybrids: Optimize Crop Engineering and Nutrient Delivery

Improving Simulations of Water Dynamics and Crop Yield in the Corn Belt

Individually-targeted incentives, diet quality and health outcomes among adults

Innovation at the Nexus of Computational, Membrane and Plant Biology

Diet, the human gastrointestinal microbiome and metabolic health

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Developing Massively Parallel Sequence for Agricultural Surveillance

A Novel Bioassay for Culturing and Characterizing Fastidious Phytopathogens

Using Eye Tracking to Better Understand Food Choices

Going Back to the Roots To Transform Soil Health into Yield

Advances in Water Limited Irrigation Management

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Enhancing Crop Pollination, Pest Control and Yield in Urban Agriculture

Building Soil Health Through Rotational Diversity and Soil Microorganisms

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Leveraging Phasic Environment and Nutrient Solution Management to Improve Resource Use Efficiency of Indoor Vertical Farming 

Year Awarded  2022

FFAR award amount   $450,000

Location   Newark, DE

Grantee Institution   University of Delaware

While previous plant physiology research has advanced our understanding of how individual factors influence plant growth and development, there has not been enough focus on how these factors work as a whole. This research aims to improve the whole-plant photosynthesis and nutritional quality of indoor crops by understanding and optimizing the interactions among key environmental factors such as light, air temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide and root-zone factors, such as fertilization, for each growth phase.

Award Winner

Enabling sustainable soil and water management through microbe-powered RF soil sensing 

Year Awarded  2022

FFAR award amount   $450,000

Location   Santa Cruz, CA

Grantee Institution   University of California Santa Cruz

Monitoring soil properties is an effective way to decrease resource consumption while maintaining crop yields. However, most farms do not use sensor data to guide soil inputs and irrigation, primarily because traditional sensor networks are costly and require significant labor to install and maintain. This research is creating a new technique for agricultural soil sensing that pairs wireless underground tags with an aboveground mobile reader.

Award Winner

Agroecosystem responses to climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity in the United States and Latin America 

Year Awarded  2022

FFAR award amount   $446,474

Location   Syracuse, NY

Grantee Institution   University of Florida

Climate change, biodiversity loss and food insecurity are three of the most pressing challenges facing humanity. To address these, agroecology stresses the importance of promoting biodiversity conservation and food sovereignty in our food system. This research uses interdisciplinary, multiregional, and community-based approaches to examine the impacts of environmental change on biodiversity and human livelihoods, and the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem services in rural and urban agricultural landscapes.

Award Winner

Targeted On-Demand Disease Management Practices/Therapies 

Year Awarded  2022

FFAR award amount   $450,000

Location   Raleigh, NC

Grantee Institution   NC State University

Increased agricultural trade, human movement, rapid pathogen evolution and a changing climate make many of the tactics used to combat pathogens impossible to implement. This research is developing an ecological community-level understanding of how plant pathogenic bacteria survive and compete in agricultural microbiomes and aims to develop new management and diagnostic tools and host/microbiome interaction models.

Award Winner

Establishing Predictive Genomics to Improve Pollinator Health 

Year Awarded  2022

FFAR award amount   $449,816

Location   West Lafayette, IN

Grantee Institution   Purdue University

Most bee breeding methods were developed almost a century ago and do not use genome-enabled breeding techniques. This research program sets out to work directly with bee breeders to develop and evaluate genome-enabled breeding techniques while producing a large genomic database for honeybees across the country.

Award Winner

Establish Power-to-Food by Cultivating and Processing Hydrogenotrophic Single Cells to Design New Sustainable Protein Supply Chains Without Arable Land 

Year Awarded  2022

FFAR award amount   $430,485

Location   Amherst, MA

Grantee Institution   University of Massacheusetts Amherst

Alternative sustainable protein supply chains not reliant on traditional agriculture are needed for future food security. This research is studying high-protein bacteria that use hydrogen as an energy source, which can be produced sustainably and using less land than traditional agriculture.

Award Winner

Holistic Irrigation Strategies for Climate-Smart Agriculture 

Year Awarded  2022

FFAR award amount   $448,339

Location   College Station, TX

Grantee Institution   Texas A&M University

Currently, agriculture decision support tools for water management are unsuitable for climate-smart agriculture because they mostly serve the single purpose of increasing crop productivity. This research is developing water management strategies that not only optimize crop productivity, but also increase carbon sequestration, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote soil health and resilience.

Award Winner

Tribal Agriculture Fellowship Inaugural Cohort 

Year Awarded  2022

FFAR award amount   $2,500,000 over five years

Location   Fayetteville, AR

Matching Funders   Farm Credit, Farmer Mac, John Deere and Native American Agriculture Fund

The Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research and the Native American Agriculture Fund created the Tribal Agriculture Fellowship (TAF) program to create opportunities for students to advance their education in agriculture, increase specialized knowledge and promote sustainability of agriculture in Tribal communities. The TAF program selected 10 students to its inaugural cohort to advance their education and careers in an agriculture-related field. TAF is a fellowship program dedicated solely to supporting the educational and professional development of Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian students pursuing technical, undergraduate and graduate degrees in agriculture.

FFAR Fellows Program 2022 Cohort 

Year Awarded  2022

Matching Funders   North Carolina State University

A unique three-year fellowship that prepares up to 48 graduate students to be the next generation of food and agriculture scientists by using an interdisciplinary approach to career readiness. Fellows work with university and industry representatives, as well as their peers, to conduct urgent research and engage in professional development.

Kirchner Food Fellowship Inaugural HBCU Cohort (2021-22) 

Year Awarded  2021

FFAR award amount   $75,000

Total award amount   $273,000

Location   Jacksonville, FL & Washington, D.C.

Matching Funders   The Kirchner Impact Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Burroughs-Wellcome Fund

The Kirchner Fellowship HBCU cohort is part of a $1 million five-year collaboration between the Kirchner Impact Foundation and the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research to increase diversity within the venture capital industry by training HBCU students to become agriculture technology venture capitalists. Kirchner HBCU fellows invest capital in early-stage food and agriculture companies applying ground-breaking technologies to provide sustainable solutions to address global food challenges.