Department Of Agriculture Nebraska

Department Of Agriculture Nebraska, a child division of the State of Nebraska, acts as a prime recipient of federal grants focused on agricultural regulation, pest surveillance, disease prevention, and food safety services. The entity operates exclusively as a grant recipient rather than a contract prime, with 294 prime grant awards and 1 sub-grant award across 11 distinct federal customer agencies since the late 1990s.

The Nebraska Department of Agriculture's federal grant portfolio centers on cooperative agreements and block grants supporting statewide agricultural regulatory and surveillance operations. Primary work falls across animal and plant health inspection, food safety compliance, pesticide regulation, and specialty crop competitiveness. Representative grants include cooperative agreements with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) for livestock disease surveillance and emergency preparedness—including foot-and-mouth disease vaccine response validation ($176.528 thousand, awarded August 2025), animal disease traceability via RFID tagging and electronic record-keeping ($311.287 thousand, April 2025), and ongoing poultry, cattle, swine, and equine disease monitoring ($300.415 thousand, April 2025). The entity also conducts targeted pest surveys under APHIS cooperative agreements, including monitoring for invasive species such as spongy moth, Asian longhorn beetle, spotted lanternfly, khapra beetle, pale potato cyst nematode, and karnal bunt across Nebraska's agricultural counties. The Food and Drug Administration funds animal and human food inspection and compliance work through definitive contracts ($88.084 thousand for human food inspection, awarded August 2023; $530.219 thousand for animal feed facility inspections, awarded September 2021) and cooperative agreements supporting laboratory chemical analysis capacity for animal food products ($180 thousand, September 2025) and food safety modernization act implementation ($275 thousand, September 2025). The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service funds specialty crop block grants supporting research, marketing, and market-access projects for crops including grapes, apples, sweetcorn, popcorn, peas, dry beans, tomatoes, potatoes, and confection sunflower ($712.794 thousand and $824.462 thousand over three-year periods, September 2025 and September 2024 respectively). The Environmental Protection Agency Region 7 provides formula grant support for statewide pesticide regulation and environmental protection programs ($1.62 million, October 2025 through September 2029, CFDA 66.605).

Federal customer concentration is heavily weighted toward USDA programs. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service accounts for 200 awards across the portfolio, while the Agricultural Marketing Service holds 31 awards. The Food and Drug Administration provides 39 named awards with $3.1 million in combined potential value, concentrated in food safety and laboratory capacity work. The Environmental Protection Agency contributes 5 awards. Award activity has remained flat year over year (14 awards annually in 2022–2025, with 4 awards recorded in 2026 to date). Ten awards totaling $88 thousand in combined potential value complete within the next twenty-four months, creating recompete exposure primarily in pest surveillance and disease-monitoring cooperative agreements with APHIS.

The Department of Agriculture Nebraska operates with no subcontract footprint and does not bid on federal contract vehicles; its role is exclusively as a recipient of federal grant funding for state-level implementation of federal agricultural, environmental, and food safety programs. The entity derives authority under Nebraska state law to conduct federal regulatory inspections and maintains trained personnel aligned with FDA and USDA program requirements.