FY2025 Farm To School Grant State Agency | USDA FNS 2025 F2S STATEAGENCY

Opportunity Information: Apply for USDA FNS 2025 F2S STATEAGENCY

The FY2025 Farm to School Grant State Agency opportunity is a discretionary grant from the USDA Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) under CFDA 10.575. It sits within the Patrick Leahy Farm to School Grant Program, which focuses on expanding students access to local foods and helping students understand where food comes from through hands-on and educational activities. The broader program supports things like local food sourcing for school meals, taste tests, school gardens, field trips, and other agricultural or food education efforts that connect schools and communities to nearby producers. This particular FY2025 track is specifically designed to help state-level agencies strengthen and scale farm to school work across their state by supporting farm to Child Nutrition Program (CNP) efforts, with an emphasis on increasing the amount of local food served and promoting agricultural education in eligible CNP operators.

This State Agency Grant funds projects that run for 24 months, with an award ceiling of up to $500,000 per project. The program anticipates making about 7 awards. A key planning point is the required match: applicants must provide at least 25 percent of the total project budget as matching support, and that match can be provided as cash or in-kind contributions. In practice, this means applicants need to line up and document non-federal support (for example, staff time, partner contributions, donated space, or other allowable in-kind resources) so that the full project budget includes at least one-quarter match alongside the federal request.

Eligibility is tightly limited to state agencies only. For this competition, a "state agency" is defined broadly as any statewide government agency that administers, or works in partnership with the agency that administers, the federal Child Nutrition Programs. Examples listed include an Office of Public Instruction, Department of Education, Department of Agriculture, or Department of Health. Importantly, eligibility is not restricted only to the specific agency that directly administers the CNPs, but if the applicant is not the CNP-administering agency for programs such as the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), Summer Food Service Program (SFSP), and/or School Breakfast Program (SBP), the application must include a letter of commitment from the state agency that does administer those programs. That commitment letter counts toward the maximum of three letters allowed. Any applicant that does not meet the eligibility definition will be deemed ineligible and removed from consideration without further review. Local governments (cities, counties, and similar entities) are explicitly not considered state agencies for this grant track and cannot apply.

A major rule to pay attention to is the one-application limit across the three FY2025 Patrick Leahy Farm to School Grant solicitations (Implementation, Turnkey, or State Agency). Applicants may submit only one application total across those tracks. If the same applicant submits multiple applications to more than one of the FY2025 solicitations through Grants.gov, all of their submissions will be removed from consideration, so it is important to choose the correct track before submitting.

The opportunity is posted on Grants.gov as Funding Opportunity Number USDA FNS 2025 F2S STATEAGENCY, titled "FY2025 Farm To School Grant State Agency." The original application closing date is January 10, 2025. USDA also scheduled two optional informational webinars to help potential applicants understand the solicitation and submit a compliant application package: an Introduction to the RFA on November 5 and a session on Submitting a Complete Grant Package on November 6, both hosted via ZoomGov. For applicants deciding among the three FY2025 tracks, the RFA references a Grant Track Decision Document in the Related Documents section on Grants.gov, and it also points readers to the eligibility section details in the RFA (noted as page 12 in the provided text).

• The Food and Nutrition Service in the food and nutrition sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "FY2025 Farm To School Grant State Agency" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 10.575.
• This funding opportunity was created on 2024-10-28.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2025-01-10. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $500,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 7 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: State governments.

Apply for USDA FNS 2025 F2S STATEAGENCY

[Watch] Creating a grant proposal using the step-by-step wizard inside the applicant portal: