AFRI Water Priorities & Regional Team

Rick Koelsch, Nebraska Extension, February 18, 2015

NIFA has three Agriculture Water priorities:

• Climate Extremes - Drought and excess moisture and implications for agriculture;
• Sustainability of water availability
• Excess nutrients in the environment with focus on nitrogen.

Regional faculty discussions are being organized to help faculty identify partners for possible multi-state proposal teams?  Who is interested? The North Central Region Water Network (NCRWN) is organizing these conversations and needs to learn who is interested.  Do you wish to participating in one of these conversations?  If yes, send you name, contact information, and NIFA water priority of interest to Rick Koelsch (rkoelsch1@unl.edu ).

Jim Dobrowolski, NIFA National Program Leader, discussed water funding opportunities with NCRWN in February.  He identified the above NIFA water priorities and suggested they will find their way into a variety of NIFA requests for proposals during the coming year. The flagship program is the Water for Agriculture program. The 2014 RFA was truly groundbreaking as NIFA recognized for the first time that water is recognize as one of NIFA challenge programs.  He anticipates that the 2015 RFA for this same program to be out in the next month (http://www.nifa.usda.gov/funding/rfas/afri.html).

For additional suggestions for water related grant programs, Jim suggested reviewing NIFA's Water web page.  He specifically mentioned NIFA's Undergraduate Education Program and SARE grant programs as additional opportunities.  In 2014, NIFA also released a National Integrated Water Quality Program.  However, Jim did not share any information about this program in 2015.  Jim did mention that NIFA's water priorities in RFAs are generally remaining relatively consistent from 2014 to 2015.  Reviewing a 2014 RFA is a first step for early planning for 2015.

Jim Dobrowolski, Ray Knighton, and Nancy Cavallaro are the primary NIFA Program Leaders for water (find contact information).