Landing Grants

If grants are right for your farm, here’s how to find them

Grant funding. Free money. Right?

Sort of. I’ve yet to find the program that gives me money for my farm simply because I’m awesome. Grant funding takes some work — and comes with some strings attached — but if you can line up your farm’s goals with a funder’s goals and communicate the match, you can unlock funds that you wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

Step One: Identifying Your Farm’s Special Features

Before we dive into the nitty-gritty of grant writing, let’s take a moment to appreciate what makes your farm special. Every piece of land has its own story, its own quirks and its own strengths. It’s time to put on your thinking cap and really dig deep into what sets your farm apart.

The reason we do this before looking for programs to apply to is because grant funders have their own goals. If you don’t go into the process knowing what your goals are, you run the risk of becoming what someone else wants in pursuit of money. And let’s be honest — there’s a lot of money out there, but none of it is enough to justify losing yourself and your farm’s purpose in pursuit of it.

So go take a walk around your property. What are you proud of? What are you doing that’s different from the farms around you? Don’t hesitate to ask your workers, family members and neighbors for their insights. If you built a brand kit with us earlier this year, this is a good time to pull out those parts of your farm that you chose to highlight.

Since we’re following Love is Love Cooperative Farm this year, we went through this exercise with them. The most obvious unique aspect of their farm is the cooperative ownership, but they’re also one of the first farms to obtain land in partnership with the Conservation Fund’s Working Farms Fund. They’re navigating the process of scaling from a five-acre property that was part of an intentional community in Atlanta to a 64-acre property about an hour outside the city. They’re learning the ropes of both a larger scale of production and a location where it’s a lot harder to find workers. And they’re learning how to expand their markets and sell to wholesale buyers.

Finding Grants

There are a few places where everyone should look, especially if you’re grossing less than $900,000 annually. The federal government’s Natural Resources Conservation Service funnels money to farmers in the form of cost shares for many of the practices you’re already doing as an organic or regenerative farmer. Think cover crops, rotational grazing, drip irrigation, etc.

Now, I’ll be honest — when you look up “bureaucracy” in the dictionary, the example given is NRCS. Your success in obtaining funds is going to depend entirely on the quality of your local NRCS agent, as well as how good you are at being a squeaky wheel if your NRCS agent isn’t up to snuff. But NRCS is the first place we tell farmers to look, especially if you need infrastructure.

In addition to NRCS, you should be looking through the programs that the Agricultural Marketing Service offers. Many of these programs are open specifically to states, which means that your state will likely apply and then turn around and re-grant the funds in smaller chunks to farmers and other food businesses. Many of you probably applied for the Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure program in your states this year.

On a state and local level, watch your department of ag website for new programs. Soil and water conservation districts often have programs, as do economic development agencies.

There are a few places that have databases of funding programs for farmers that you can search. ATTRA (Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas) is decent for national programs, and Ambrook has a large, if not particularly targeted, database of programs. Good Agriculture doesn’t have a searchable database — instead, we’ve extracted goals and eligibility from several hundred programs and created a service that will notify you when programs you’re eligible for open. If that’s something you’re interested in, go take our funding survey at goodagriculture.com/grant-notification and sign up for our funding notification service.

Understanding the Grant Giver’s Goals

Once you’ve got a good handle on what makes your farm tick, it’s time to turn your attention to the folks holding the purse strings. Every grant program has its own set of goals and priorities, and your job is to figure out how your farm’s unique aspects align with those objectives. 

As you dive into this process, it’s useful to think of grant givers as folks who speak a different language. The words are English, but they don’t always mean the same things as when you or I say them. These programs are designed by people who don’t farm — some by people who have never even been on a farm. The language is going to be more complicated than it has to be, and you may need to pop some phrases into Google or Chat GPT to understand the context.

Plowing through paperwork — with ChatGPT If you’re not using Chat GPT, you’re missing out on a lot of potential help for things like explaining bureaucratic gobbledygook and summarizing documents. For the casual user, it’s free and easy to toss a PDF with grant guidelines into the interface and get a plain-language summary of what the program is about. Then use that summary to skim back through the document and confirm that the AI got it right by looking for the key words and deadlines. That’s way easier than trying to read and understand the whole thing from scratch.

Once you’ve found a potential grant, download the guidelines. Depending on the program, this document will be called the RFA (Request for Applications), RFP (Request for Proposals) or NFO/NOFO (Notice of Funding Opportunity). Take some time to comb through this document. First, you’ll want to find the stated goal of the program. Then, look for the eligibility, project types and whether a match is required. This should give you a decent idea of whether your farm can fit what this program is looking to fund.

If you think a particular program could be a good fit, the next step is to look up past winners. Sometimes these aren’t available, but if they are, this is another good way to cross reference what has been funded in the past with what you have in mind.

Next month we’ll discuss how Love Is Love applied for a specific grant and provide some tips on how to optimize your chances of receiving funding.

Kirsten Simmons is the co-founder and Chief Farming Officer for Good Agriculture (goodagriculture.com), a company dedicated to helping farmers find funding, manage finances, reach new customers and get certified. She also farms at Ecosystem Farm in Atlanta (ecosystemfarm.com). 

For Love Is Love, we decided to apply for the Farm Labor Stabilization and Protection Pilot Program (https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/FLSP_NFO.pdf). This was a new program, and the bureaucracy was strong with this one. The stated purpose was: 

“[To] improve food and agricultural supply chain resiliency by addressing challenges agricultural employers face with labor shortages and instability. The FLSP Program seeks to advance the following Administration priorities: Goal 1: Drive U.S. economic recovery and safeguard domestic food supply by addressing current labor shortages in agriculture; Goal 2: Reduce irregular migration from Northern Central America through the expansion of regular pathways; and Goal 3: Improve working conditions for all farmworkers.”

This seems decently straightforward. But how on earth do those goals fit into a grant program? The answer is, not cleanly. 

As became apparent over several webinars and email exchanges, the people administering this program had only a general idea of how it was going to work. The program was a laundry list of different practices, some more practical than others. Offer collective bargaining options to workers? Easy enough to implement. Only recruit H2A workers through the ministries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador? A bit problematic when said ministries wouldn’t answer emails with questions about recruitment. Applicants could choose how many practices they would commit to implementing with the funding, and the number of practices would determine whether their application held platinum, silver or baseline status. That status, cross referenced with the number of full-time workers they employed, determined the amount of money they could apply for. 

Confused yet? Add on the complexity of navigating “existing practices” versus “new practices” to implement and figuring out what constituted a “commitment,” and we had the makings of a head-spinning application due right smack after the December holidays, when no one would be checking their emails anyway.

That said, we suspected Love is Love would be a strong candidate for this program. The ethos of their collective ownership means that they were already doing most of what was on the practice list. Given that, we knew that writing a winning application would depend on our ability to clearly describe what Love is Love hoped to achieve, be honest about where they needed help, and convince the grant committee that these practices were things that Love is Love truly wanted to do – we weren’t just promising to create conflict resolution procedures to get grant money.

So we set out to write a winning grant application. First, we wrote about what Love is Love already does for their workers, how workers can become owners, and what challenges they’ve run into as they expand their operations. Then we addressed every single practice in the RFA and described in excruciating detail what Love is Love currently does and what they planned to do. This got down to the level of checklists for inspecting worker housing and contact information for the plumbers and electricians who would get called in if a problem arose. It also got incredibly repetitive – when it comes to the differences between preventing retaliation, having a complaint procedure and preventing management from interfering in cooperative bargaining, for example, at the end of the day for a small team the answer comes down to “we’re not sure since this has never come up before, but please trust us that we’re good people and we’ll figure it out.”

When we submitted the application, we weren’t sure what to expect given that the program was new and we were trying to thread the needle on a few of the practices – for example, since we hadn’t heard anything from any of the government ministries, we wrote that we would recruit simultaneously through an agency and a government ministry with the goal of having one worker come from each source. But not only did Love is Love win $400,000, we also wrote a winning application for another GA farm!

At this point, it’s worth saying that if FLSP hadn’t been a fit for Love is Love, we wouldn’t have written the application. Let’s say Love is Love weren’t cooperatively owned and they had already been visited a couple of times by Department of Labor inspectors for workplace violations. We could certainly have written the application and spun the situation, but that’s against our ethos as a company and would likely have been a waste of time.

You don’t want to apply for every grant that your farm is technically eligible for – you’ll spend all your time writing applications, to start with, and you’ll start to view your farm as something to shoehorn into someone else’s priorities rather than the place where you’ve put in so much labor and love. We counseled a lot of potential applicants not to apply for the recent wave of Resilient Food System Infrastructure funding because the stated goal of the program was to invest in projects that would benefit the most number of farmers and consumers. An individual farmer wanting to upgrade their cold storage simply wasn’t going to rank higher than a small flash freezing facility serving multiple farmers that wanted to add a machine to slice produce prior to freezing. This was especially true given that this was a new program and the needs were huge. If RFSI continues to be funded, this dynamic may change over the next several years as the high impact projects are funded and the lower impact projects are able to compete. But we told several farmers that applying this year was a waste of their time and ours given the program goals and limited funding. Being eligible for a program doesn’t automatically make you a good applicant.

Putting It All Together: Crafting Your Winning Application

So how do you combine your unique farm with the goals of the funder to come out with grant funds?

Tell Your Story

• Use concrete examples to illustrate your farm’s unique qualities and let your passion shine through.
• Work within the lines of the application – make sure the budget covers your actual financial plans, not your vision for what the funding will achieve
• Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself and even use the same phrases over and over again. Use the words in the RFP to describe what you’re planning to do.

Be Specific

• Provide detailed plans for how you’ll use the grant money, down to the dollar and cent
• Include timelines and measurable goals – how long will each step of the project take, and how will you know when each step is done? This may mean you include sentences that feel painfully obvious – think “After any conflict between workers and management, the elected worker representatives will examine all aspects of the interaction within a two week period and assess what worked well and what requires additional improvement.”
• Show that you’ve really thought this through. Grant applications are not the space to wave your hands and say ‘it’ll happen somehow’.

Address Challenges Head-On

• Every farm has its struggles – don’t shy away from them. In our application for Love is Love, we were honest that they would need help navigating the H2A process, especially if the government ministries weren’t responding to email.
• Explain how the program will help you overcome these challenges. The FLSP offers technical support for farms to implement the recommended practices, and we highlighted that Love is Love would appreciate having help to create formal procedures for conflict resolution and collective bargaining.
• Frame problems as opportunities for growth and improvement. Show how you want to change, and how the program will help you get there.

Get a Second (and Third) Opinion

• Have someone else read your application before you submit it. This is especially important because this is a language we’re not necessarily familiar with as farmers – it’s easy to let your eyes glaze over and miss the point of a sentence or entire paragraph.
• Find readers who aren’t familiar with your farm – they’ll be able to spot any confusing or unclear sections. Having a family member read your application can help you refine your descriptions of your farm and goals, but they’ll be just as familiar with the operations as you are and won’t be as well placed to help you identify holes in your narrative. If you’d like, Good Agriculture offers grant review services for farmers starting at $50/hour.
• Be open to feedback and willing to make revisions. The strong farmer knows what her strengths are and can accept help. I’ll venture that very few farmers are truly strong grant writers, so all of us should be listening for the flaws in our work

Rowing in the Same Direction

Grant funding isn’t an easy solution, but when you find a program that fits with what you’re already trying to accomplish you can use grant funds to boost you on your way to your goals. You’ll have to wade through the bureaucratic language and explain your plans until you go blue in the face, and then the money won’t show up quickly. For Love is Love, we submitted the application on January 3rd, 2024, heard we had won in June of 2024 and funding likely won’t land in their accounts until sometime during spring of 2025. But when you can find a program that fits with what you’re already planning to do and you have the financial flexibility to wait for the money to show up, grant funding can be an awesome boost. Love is Love was already planning to hire H2A workers and become a Fair Food certified farm – and now they’ll eventually have $400,000 to help them reach those goals and others.

You should view grant programs through the lens of what you’re already doing and find the ones that fit you well. Craft the best application you can using the language from the RFP, get lots of feedback, and you’ll have a shot at getting extra money for things you’re already trying to do.

Next month we’ll be looking at sales processes for Love is Love, specifically around their wholesale seedling orders and how to cut down the time Monica spends checking orders and keeping track of them in the greenhouse.
Kirsten Simmons is the co-founder and Chief Farming Officer for Good Agriculture (goodagriculture.com), a company dedicated to helping farmers find funding, manage finances, reach new customers and get certified. She also farms at Ecosystem Farm in Atlanta (ecosystemfarm.com).