Cooperative Agreement 7200AA21LE00005

The Cooperative Agreement award of $515,000 from the United States Agency for International Development will support Cornell University in effectively engaging students from minority-serving institutions in the ongoing activities of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Crop Improvement and its partners through September 2024. Under the USAID Foreign Assistance for Programs Overseas program (CFDA #98.001), which works to support long-term and equitable economic growth and advance U.S. foreign...

This Project Grant award from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Crop Protection and Pest Management (CPPM) Competitive Grants Program, CFDA 10.329, provides $199,157 to The Pennsylvania State University for a 2-year project to develop sustainable crop protection strategies using plant-derived bioactive compounds to manage the invasive fall armyworm pest in corn and sorghum. The project aims to study the effectiveness of bioactive compounds from cultivars of corn and...

This five-year, $649,977 project grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA) Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program (CFDA 10.310) will fund research at North Carolina State University to develop an automated, repeatable process for mapping host crop species essential to forecasting the spread of invasive plant pests and pathogens. Using machine learning and publicly available imagery, the researchers will build...

The University of Nebraska was awarded a $500,000 Project Grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Biotechnology Risk Assessment Research program to evaluate the impact of blended seed refuges and the VIP3A Bacillus thuringiensis toxin on western bean cutworm resistance management. Over a four-year period ending August 2025, the University will optimize artificial diets for western bean cutworm susceptibility monitoring and...

This Project Grant award, valued at $797,594, was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biological Sciences (CFDA 47.074) program. The award supports a research project led by a team of scientists from the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany to develop crop varieties that are tolerant to changing growing temperatures and resistant to evolving plant pathogens. The goal is to ensure future food security by creating crops with stable immunity that can adapt to both shifting...

This $600,000 Project Grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (AFRI program, CFDA 10.310) aims to identify the specific antimicrobial molecules produced by the beneficial bacterium Pseudomonas protegens PBL3 and understand how they inhibit the growth of a pathogenic bacterium that causes a devastating disease in rice crops. The goal is to develop biologically-based solutions to control crop diseases and reduce losses, thereby alleviating...

Cornell University was awarded a $180,000 Project Grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program. The grant will fund research from June 1, 2023 through May 31, 2026 to investigate eavesdropping behavior between two major agricultural insect pests, Acalymma tristis and Acalymma vittatum, that damage cucurbit crops. The research goals will be pursued through laboratory and field...

This $788,000 project grant from the United States Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program (CFDA 10.310) supports the development and evaluation of conventionally bred biofortified orange corn with high provitamin A carotenoids and zinc to improve human nutrition. Key objectives include selecting and evaluating maize germplasm in Mexico and the U.S. for increased provitamin A and zinc, determining the...

This Project Grant award from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) under the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) program provides $750,000 to the Regents of the University of California at Riverside to develop novel insecticidal proteins derived from insect-parasitic nematodes. The goal is to characterize these toxins and assess their efficacy in controlling insect pests in agricultural systems, either through transgenic crops or foliar application. This...

This $3,500,000 Project Grant award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture's Specialty Crop Research Initiative (SCRI) program aims to improve management of the corn earworm pest in sweet corn production. Key activities include: Measuring overwintering success and early season activity of corn earworm, developing a spread model, and monitoring resistance to Bt toxins and insecticides. Improving integrated pest management through better adult moth...