USDA Is Offering $140 Million in Agricultural Research Grants. Your Letter of Intent Is Due Thursday.

For land-grant universities and agricultural research institutions, this Thursday carries more financial weight than most: it is the letter-of-intent deadline for USDA's largest integrative research competition, and missing it forecloses the March application entirely.

The USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture has opened its FY 2026 Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Strengthening Agricultural Systems competition with $140 million available for projects up to $10 million each. Letters of intent are due February 26, 2026. Full applications follow March 26. Neither deadline is flexible — NIFA's rules are explicit that LOI submission is a prerequisite for application, and the agency does not accept late materials.

What the Strengthening Agricultural Systems Program Actually Requires

The SAS program is unusual among federal grant competitions in one critical structural requirement: every funded project must integrate three distinct functions — research, education, and extension — in a single proposal. Not research with a nod to outreach. Not education that mentions field trials in passing. The program requires that all three functions be "interdependent and necessary for the success of the project."

NIFA enforces this requirement at the budget level: no more than two-thirds of total project costs may focus on any single function. A proposal that allocates 70 percent to laboratory research and adds token extension activities to satisfy the integration language will not survive peer review. The reviewers are specifically evaluating whether the three functions are genuinely connected or simply coexisting in the same document.

This structure reflects USDA's theory that agricultural problems are not solved at the bench alone — discoveries need to move through education systems and into the hands of farmers, extension agents, and food system practitioners. The SAS program funds the full arc of that process, which is why the eligible applicant list looks the way it does.

Who Can Apply

Eligible applicants are limited to institutions with formal connections to the land-grant and agricultural education system:

• 1862 land-grant institutions — the original Morrill Act colleges and state agricultural universities
• 1890 land-grant institutions — historically Black colleges and universities established under the Second Morrill Act
• 1994 land-grant institutions — tribal colleges and universities
• Hispanic-Serving Institutions
• State Agricultural Experiment Stations
• State-controlled institutions of higher education

Foreign organizations and private research universities without land-grant status are not eligible. This is not a program where eligibility is ambiguous — NIFA is specific, and reviewer time is not spent on applications from ineligible entities.

Three Priority Areas, One AI Carve-Out

The FY 2026 NOFO funds work in three core priority areas, each reflecting current agricultural policy concerns.

New uses and expanding markets for agriculture and forestry products. This covers bioproducts, novel food applications, timber market development, and projects that help producers identify premium-value uses for what they grow. With commodity price volatility creating persistent income pressure for farm operations, market diversification research is a stated federal priority.

Solutions to pests and diseases of plants or animals. Integrated pest management, disease surveillance, resistant variety development, and agricultural biosecurity fall here. The multi-year run of highly pathogenic avian influenza outbreaks has accelerated federal interest in disease response research, and this priority area reflects that.

Diet-related chronic disease. Projects connecting agricultural production decisions to nutrition outcomes — working across the food system from growing practices to clinical settings — fit under this priority. The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee's current deliberations have raised the policy profile of this research area heading into 2026.

A separate funding category within the same NOFO targets Artificial Intelligence for K-12 Food and Agricultural Sciences. This category offers awards of $1 million to $2 million — smaller than the flagship SAS grants — for projects integrating AI literacy into agricultural education curricula. NIFA anticipates six awards. Institutions developing teaching infrastructure and curriculum rather than production research should review this category separately; it has its own eligibility nuances and review criteria.

What Separates Funded Applications from the Rest

NIFA reviewers have evaluated hundreds of SAS applications across funding cycles, and the patterns in what gets funded and what does not are reasonably consistent.

The letter of intent is not a formality to complete in an afternoon. NIFA uses LOIs to calibrate review panels, match reviewer expertise to proposal topics, and manage the workload of a large competition. A vague LOI — one that describes the topic in general terms without specifying the three functions, the priority area, key personnel, and approximate budget — signals that the team has not done the intellectual work to know what it is actually proposing. Be specific now, while there is still time.

The integration section is where most proposals fall short. Reviewers are explicitly evaluating whether research, education, and extension are genuinely interconnected or merely described in proximity. "Research findings will inform our extension fact sheets" is not integration. A competitive application shows how extension practitioners' field observations feed back into the research design, and how the educational curriculum requires the new knowledge the research is generating. The three functions should be structurally dependent on each other.

Cost sharing applies to commodity-specific proposals. The NOFO specifies which project types trigger matching requirements and at what percentage. Finding out about cost sharing requirements after the application is drafted is a common and painful way to miss a deadline.

All documents must be submitted as PDFs through Grants.gov. NIFA does not accept Word files, and three documents are required for a complete application: the Project Summary/Abstract, the Project Narrative, and the Bibliography and References Cited. Missing any one of these means the application will not be reviewed.

The Opportunity for Institutions Outside the Research Flagship Tier

The FY 2026 SAS program is worth particular attention for 1890 institutions, 1994 tribal colleges, and HSIs. These institutions are explicitly eligible, and NIFA has historically used the SAS program to build research and extension capacity at institutions that do not compete on the same terms as flagship R1 universities on NIH-style competitions. Project teams do not need to be housed at a single institution — multi-institutional proposals that combine the strengths of, say, a research-intensive 1862 land-grant with the community and practitioner networks of a 1890 institution or tribal college are exactly what the program's integration framework is designed to accommodate.

For institutions in states with historically smaller shares of federal agricultural research funding, a $10 million SAS award represents a genuine infrastructure investment — enough to hire postdoctoral researchers, build multi-year longitudinal studies, and establish the kind of extension presence that compounds across funding cycles.

The full NOFO is on Grants.gov as USDA-NIFA-AFRI-011134. Technical questions go to grantapplicationquestions@usda.gov. The LOI is due Thursday, February 26. The application is due March 26.

If you are at an eligible institution and have not started an LOI, today is the day. Tools like Granted track NIFA and AFRI deadlines alongside 143 other federal, state, and foundation programs — a practical way to stay ahead of the next cycle if this one is moving faster than your team can respond.