Wild Animal Initiative Grants Program

Grants for Wild Animal Welfare Research (Wild Animal Initiative's Challenge Grants) is sponsored by Wild Animal Initiative. These Challenge Grants support researchers exploring critical research questions that will unlock new avenues of wild animal welfare research and are not prioritized by other funders. Each round of Challenge Grants calls for projects within one or more specific themes.

Feral Swine Eradication Program is sponsored by USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS). This program provides grant funding to qualified partners to help landowners reduce wild hog populations that threaten farms, ranches, and natural resources. The program addresses both the economic and biological impacts of feral swine.

Round 2 of the Farming Futures Automation and Robotics competition is the UK's largest dedicated agri-robotics funding call, offering up to 20,000,000 pounds for collaborative R&D on robotic and intelligent automated systems for farming, horticulture and forestry in England. It sits within Defra's Farming Innovation Programme and is delivered by Innovate UK. The scope is broader than previous rounds: alongside core arable and horticultural crops it now covers farmed animals, fruit, orchards, vineyards, protected cropping, ornamental plant propagation and monitoring, and forestry operations. Eligible technologies span robotic and intelligent automated machines, imaging and sensing systems for data collection, post-harvest automation carried out on farm, intelligent food storage systems, and on-farm energy management - a list that puts perception, machine learning and autonomous decision-making at the centre of what the fund will support, even though the competition title leads with robotics rather than AI. The named target problems are productivity, reliance on labour, resource use efficiency, food quality and traceability, waste, crop and animal health, animal welfare and sustainability. Two points determine whether a strong technical idea is fundable here. First, this is explicitly a collaborative competition: a minimum of two organisations must apply for funding, the lead must be a UK-registered business of any size, and no single organisation may take more than 70 per cent of eligible costs. Second, the exclusions are specific and catch applicants out - equine, wild fisheries, aquaculture, medicinal crops, food processing and forestry harvesting equipment are all out of scope. The competition opened 3 August 2026 and closes 30 September 2026 at 11:00am UK time, with projects running 12 to 36 months, starting by 1 March 2027 and ending by 28 February 2030.

Wild Horse and Burro Program is sponsored by Bureau of Land Management (BLM) (Department of the Interior). The objective of this program is to involve the use of mustangs or wild horses in programs that promote the BLM's Wild Horse and Burro Program and increase the number of animals placed into private ownership.