FY2026 Cooperative Agreement for 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline Administrator

Brownfields Job Training Grants is sponsored by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA's Brownfields Job Training Program provides grants to eligible organizations, including nonprofits, to develop local workforces for the assessment, cleanup, or preparation of contaminated sites (brownfields) for reuse. The grants fund training programs that equip unemployed and underemployed residents with skills for full-time, sustainable employment in the environmental field, including sustainable remediation and chemical safety.

USDA NIFA's SBIR/STTR Phase I program is the principal non-dilutive federal funding channel for small businesses commercializing agricultural technology, and it has become a significant AI funding source without ever being branded as one. The program is organized into ten topic areas rather than a single AI call, which means applicants must locate their AI work inside an agricultural problem area - plant production and protection, animal production and protection, forests and related resources, food science and nutrition, rural and community development, aquaculture, biofuels and biobased products, small and mid-size farms, and agriculturally related manufacturing and alternative and renewable energy. In practice this structure rewards proposals framed around a specific production constraint rather than around a modeling technique. Machine learning for crop and soil monitoring from remote sensing, computer vision for pathogen and pest detection, autonomous harvesting and weeding robotics, decision-support and yield-prediction systems, and sensor fusion for livestock health all fit comfortably, but reviewers are agricultural scientists and commercialization specialists, not ML researchers, and proposals that lead with architecture rather than with the farm-level problem tend to score poorly. Phase I awards run from $125,000 to $181,500 for feasibility work, a range that has drifted upward in recent cycles, with Phase II available to successful Phase I awardees for full R&D. Eligibility is the standard SBIR profile: a for-profit small business concern qualifying for research or R&D purposes, US-based and majority US-owned; the STTR variant requires formal cooperative R&D with a nonprofit research institution, which is the natural route for teams spinning technology out of a land-grant university. Timing is the practical difficulty - NIFA has historically released the Phase I RFA around July with applications due roughly twelve weeks later in early October, but exact dates shift year to year and the FY2026 date was still pending at the time of review. Applicants should register on SAM.gov and Grants.gov well in advance and subscribe to Grants.gov alerts, since the release-to-deadline window is short for a program that expects a commercialization plan alongside the technical narrative.