Institute made possible through a partnership between public-private entities including MU’s CAFNR, the Missouri Department of Conservation, and the Missouri Conservation Heritage Foundation

Five-year USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture grant will help double cover crop seed production

CAFNR is hosting a webinar for faculty and staff to learn more about a new grant program launched to support Missouri value-added agriculture. The Missouri Agricultural and Small Business Development Authority (MASBDA) is accepting applications for its new Show-Me Entrepreneurial Grants for Agriculture (SEGA) program. Maximum grant awards vary by program, but the largest can be up to $250,000 per awardee. The SEGA program consists of five separate grant programs tailored to innovation, technical assistance, workforce development, institutional education and fee offsets. This grant program was developed to address recommendations of the Missouri Food, Beverage, and Forest Products Manufacturing Task Force, of which Dean Daubert is a part. Grant applications must be submitted to MASBDA by 5 p.m. Friday, April 28. Grant program application forms and evaluation criteria are available online. CAFNR will offer a webinar specifically for faculty and staff to understand the grant opportunities and the potential for collaboration across the college. Attend the virtual meeting Monday, March 20, from 2:45-3:30 p.m. via this Zoom link.

There’s still time to participate in Show Me Research Week! Encourage your graduate and undergraduate students and post-docs to participate. Research presentations must be submitted to the portal by March 22. Learn more and register: research.missouri.edu/show-me-research-presenters

The CAFNR Research Council is continuing its online webinar series for the spring semester. Registration is not required. Upcoming events include:

• Thursday, March 9, at 3:30 p.m.: Ben Schrag, Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Program Director and Policy Liaison, will present “Lab-to-Market Programs at the National Science Foundation.” Join on Zoom.
• Thursday, March 23, 3:30 p.m.: Keri Jacobs, Associate Professor and MFA Chair in Agribusiness, will present “From Anecdote to Evidence: A look into governance practices of agricultural cooperatives,” Join on Zoom.

This academic year, CAFNR welcomed three new George Washington Carver fellows — Melissa Jones, Gabrielle Brewer and Hannah-Rose Foote — to campus

The following are helpful ways to create strong goals and objectives when writing proposals.

• Make your goals and objectives stand out – use bullets or numbers – it’s worth taking the extra space
• Be concise – you’ll be expanding/explaining them later in the proposal
• Make them measurable and evaluable – if you’re required to include an evaluation section, you should include something to evaluate each goal/objective. There should be a direct correlation between goals and evaluation.
• Be realistic – the reviewers will see through unrealistic goals (either too high or too low)
• Be focused – what is this particular project going to do – if you want to show how your project fits into the bigger picture, you can add a few sentences after your goals explaining your plans for future projects.

Example of a bad goal: Improve the use of the benchmarking database

Example of a good goal: Increase the use of the benchmarking database by adding 20 new farmers per institution per year

Join Christie Terry and Amanda Carr from the Division of Research to learn about NSF and NIH funding via Zoom. They’ll discuss the role of the program officer, how to identify funding opportunities, and tips for developing successful applications.

• Intro to National Institutes of Health funding, March 16, 12-1 p.m. (Register)
• Intro to National Science Foundation funding, March 22, 12-1 p.m. (Register)

Our goal in the CAFNR Grants Office is to be a partner to our 400+ faculty members, post-doctoral and graduate students to minimize the stress of proposal submission and help submit the best possible version of the proposals to the sponsor. However, when the CAFNR Grants Office is brought into last-minute proposals, everyone has added stress. Stress for the faculty member pulling everything together in a short time, stress for the faculty members with proposals already in process must be juggled and reprioritized, and stress for the Grants Office. We are quickly reviewing guidelines, checking fringe, indirect, and other rates to make sure the right percentages were used in the budget, gathering all the information needed for PeopleSoft entry and hoping everyone will be available to approve the ePSRS and confirming department IDs and shared credit splits. There are so many steps to get a proposal to Sponsored Programs for final review and submission and condensing everything into a couple days is extremely difficult.

When given ample notice to assess guidelines and review proposals, details that might be lost in a quick examination are found. Sponsors sometimes put very specific details into guidelines to weed out those proposals that do not meet all the requirements as an easy disqualification. No one wants to have their proposal tossed out of consideration due to going over a page limit or not providing a letter of support that is required.

Sponsored Programs Administration requires five business days for reviewing and submitting proposals. CAFNR Grants Office requires only one additional day to receive all completed documents for a submission. Most of the time, that is not enough to get everything processed, so we ask to be notified of a planned proposal as soon as a PI knows they are going to submit. This way the grant writer and the PI can discuss the timeline for submission allowing us to help you reduce your proposal preparation stress. We are here to help you submit a winning proposal.

CAFNR faculty members have received the following recent grants (listed by Principal Investigator):

Andrew Scaboo, National USDA Uniform Soybean Tests / Yield, Disease Resistance and Quality Traits Evaluation of Public Breeding Lines (Year 3 of 3), Agricultural Research Service, 10/1/22-8/31/23, $6,374

Grover Shannon, SOYGEN3: Building capacity to increase soybean genetic gain for yield and composition through combining genomics-assisted breeding with characterization of future environments, University of Minnesota, 10/1/22-9/30/23, $59,946

Rebecca North, Statewide Lakes Assessment Project, Missouri Department of Natural Resources, 4/1/23-3/31/24, $258,714

Alba Argerich, Lakes of Missouri Volunteer Program, Missouri Department of Natural Resources, 4/1/23-3/31/24, $237,560

Peter Sutovsky, High Throughput Phenotyping of Polygenic Heritable Sperm Defects, USDA-NIFA, 4/1/23-3/31/27, $1,300,000

Robert Schnabel, PARTNERSHIP: Development of Genomic Reference Materials for Cattle, USDA-NIFA, 7/1/23-6/30/26, $800,000

Bradley Wilson, ECSG Beltwide Seed Quality 2.0 project, Cotton, Inc., 1/1/23-12/31/23, $6,000

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