 Well, hello everyone and welcome and we're going to go ahead and get started. So first of all, a few housekeeping things. So I want to make sure we'll just like at a conference that you're in the right room. This is a webinar for what you're interested in. So this is a webinar to prepare an application for the North Central Region SAERS Research and Education grant program. And this is the pre-proposal process. The North Central Region are the upper 12 Midwestern states of the United States. So if you are looking to do sustainable agriculture research in that primarily affects those upper 12 Midwest states, you are in the right spot. And this is for 2023 research and education funding. And this research and education grant program is a competitive grant program that funds collaborative teams of scientists, farmers, institutions and educators exploring sustainable agriculture through research projects or education demonstration projects. And I'm just going to start off with a few housekeeping items. So I am Beth Nelson. I am the regional coordinator for the North Central SAERS region. And I also coordinate specifically the research and education grant program. Shannon Osborn has also joined us today. She's one of our administrative council members, and she is the technical committee chair. So she oversees the process of review of the full proposals. And as you'll see, is involved as well with the pre-proposal review process. And then helping out today, Marie Flanagan is hosting along with Erin Schneider. So they're going to help get questions answered. We have quite a few people signed up for this webinar today. And so I am going to ask you to put your questions in the chat. You can also unmute and ask them at the end. We're going to hold questions till I run through this first set of slides. You can enter your questions in the chat and then Marie will funnel those to me at the end or you can unmute at the end. But let's hold them till the end, if possible. So first I'm going to go through some overview slides about the SAERS program, kind of give you an idea of what our philosophy is to see if your idea might fit well with our program and with our goals and objectives. And then I get through those and I'm going to race through those pretty quickly because the same, the same presentation is also on the website with the notes as a PDF. And that's in the same spot where you'll download the call for proposals for this grant program. So I am going to kind of race through the slides. Marie is also recording this webinar so you can go back and look at that as well. So I'm going to go through those overview slides. Shannon is going to join, is going to give you maybe some tips and ideas of things that she has seen over the years, as she's looked at pre-proposals and full proposals. And then we'll answer questions, the general questions about applying, and then for those of you who aren't familiar with the online proposal application system, I'll have Marie pull that up at the end. Those of you who are familiar can end, but the rest of you who want to see what the application online actually looks like, we can open that up for you. So that is the plan and with that I am just going to go ahead and dive dive in. So Marie, if you can move to the next slide. So Sarah is the Sustainable Ag Research and Education grant program. We've been around for over 30 years and we are funded by the USDA. We are part of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, or NFA. Next slide. So our mission statement for Sarah is that we provide grants and outreach to advance sustainable innovations to the whole of American agriculture. So right off the bat, you see that we cover a whole lot of topics. That's a very broad charge. You can move on to the next one Marie. We are a different kind of a grant program in some ways. We are decentralized and that means that the North Central region so again those 12 upper Midwestern states are governed by an administrative council that decides what our priorities are going to be within the scope of overall research that we have there. We are science based but we are also very strongly a grassroots funding group and we fund farmer driven research. So that means that we look at problem solving practical applications of the research, and I'll just add that while we know basic research is critical. with this grant program funds. So we really are looking for solutions to problems that farmers have brought up that could be implemented in the field within the next few years. So those are the kinds of things that fit the SAR grant program. You can go to the next slide. So I did want to just briefly mention that we're not just a grant funding program, although that is our main purpose. National SAR puts out bulletins which are free as well as some really great publications that are low-cost books that you can order online. You can look for that by going to SAR.org. And I will just say about the bulletins that if you teach classes or do workshops that those technical those bulletins can be ordered. You can order multiple copies of those so that you could use them in your classroom. So I just wanted to make you aware of those resources. Go ahead, Marie. So all SAR projects need to address three aspects of sustainability. And I know you're all familiar with those. So people, profit, and protection of the nation's land and water. So you'll see in that even at the pre-proposal level, one of the first things you have to do is consider how your project will address our outcomes for social, environmental, and economic aspects of sustainability. You can go on to the next slide, Marie. I will say that for scientists, we are sometimes challenged by the social sustainability aspect. And so National SAR has put some effort lately into trying to think through and develop resources to help both applicants and reviewers think about what does it mean? What are the impacts of social sustainability? What kind of outcomes would we have? And maybe even how do we measure those? So we have a new resource online. There's a link to that. And this is just the graphic for it. It actually goes through some of those a little bit more. And so if you're having trouble thinking about social outcomes for the work you're doing, that might be a good resource for you to look at. Next slide. I mentioned that we have a broad charge. And so we fund proposals in a broad range of topics. So integrated or sustainable pest and weed management, water quality, crop diversification, marketing, urban agriculture, we cover a lot of territory. Next slide. We are the north central region. And so we're that part that's marked in kind of that yellow gold color there. That's the north central region of SAR. Thanks for the graphic help, there. Great. So if you are in one of those 12 upper Midwest states, you can apply to this program. We do accept applications within the United States outside of our region, as long as they primarily affect the north sustainable agriculture in the north central region. If you have questions about that, please call me. I did also want to mention that we have other grants. And in fact, four of our grant programs are open right now. The farmer rancher program goes directly to fund innovative ideas on someone's farm or ranch. It goes directly to farmers and ranchers. The youth educator one supports youth educators who are giving sustainable egg information to young adults or youth. And then our professional, sorry, our partnership grant program is also open. And I'm going to say a little bit more at the end, because I think that program in particular might be of interest to the same group of people who are considering applying for the research and education grant program. So you can go on to the next slide. So I'm going to talk a little bit now about the specifics for the research and education grant program. So this is our largest grant program. We have grants for up to $250,000. We do allow 10% indirect costs. They can go for up to 36 months. There is often an opportunity to get a no cost extension for an additional year. But the application can't be for longer than 36 months. We do have, it's not quite so new anymore. I think this is our third year of offering our long term funding option. I'll say a little bit more about that later. That's basically for projects that cannot be completed within that typical three or four timeline. And the funding is a little complicated. I'll talk about that a little bit later. But if you're interested in that aspect, I'd suggest you call me and we can talk about whether your project fits that or not. The projects that you apply for here can be research or education projects or demonstration projects. The proposals are due October 13th at four o'clock central daylight time. So note that earlier time. So that is when the proposal system closes. We don't have technical support after that, so it needs to be in by four o'clock central time on Thursday, October 13th. We invite 30 to 35 preproposals and we have funding for 15 to 16. We typically get about 150 preproposals in this program. So it is a pretty tough cut. The funds from this program are a bit because it's a preproposal process. It takes a little while. So the funds are available for this mid fall 2023. You can go to the next slide, Marie. So these preproposals are reviewed by mostly by members of our administrative council. We have a few other people that help us to review, partly because we get so many in and they also fill out our expertise and topic needs. They are scored on relevance to sustainable agriculture in our region. We look at the methods and approach, but we don't really expect great detail at this point. You'll see in the word limits that you don't have space to put in great detail. Mostly the reviewers are looking to see if they think your method or your approach will lead to the results you want to get in the project if it's an appropriate approach. And then they also look at farmer engagement and farmer engagement is not just giving, you know, giving a talk to farmers. It's actually bringing them into research. It doesn't have to be on farm research, but it should be engaging them and talking about the research. Maybe you have an advisory committee or something like that. We divide them into these groups based loosely on expertise and topic and then the administrative, the groups will recommend ones to move forward and invite for full proposals. And I'll talk a little bit more about the timeline for that in a later slide. Go ahead, Marie. So successful pre-proposals demonstrate relevance to the north central region. So, you know, how does this apply to the work that is happening in these upper 12 mid-western states? They address NCR stairs three broad based outcomes and you'll see those are written in the call for proposals, but as you can imagine, again, those affect profit people and planet or environmental outcomes. And really importantly, they involve farmers and ranchers in the project. And I say that over and over again, because that's what's maybe a little bit different about SAR. You must have farmers and ranchers involved in your project. You can go to the next slide. They have clear outcomes and I'll talk a little bit about what outcomes are and give some examples later. So outcomes are not necessarily the scientific results you're going to get from your proposal, but it's what you expect to happen as a result of your proposal. So often, those outcomes are going to come from your outreach and your education, your sharing of the information of what you've discovered. So, and I'll go into that a little bit later. Go ahead, Marie. This is the actual pre-proposal application. So it is an online submission and the link is in the call for pre-proposals. For those of you who came into the webinar later at the end, we'll go ahead, Marie's going to go ahead and open that up so you can see what that system looks like. We do suggest that you prepare a Word document first. It just helps you know what your word limits are and that type of thing. And it also will give you a change. Then you can cut and paste it into the online system. Next slide. So I just want to say something quick about the long-term funding. So there is a checkbox in the pre-proposal for indicating that you are applying under the long-term option. Those pre-proposals will be reviewed by a separate committee and they're going to look at whether this is applicable under all the other criteria, but also they'll look at whether this fits their long-term funding criteria. And you really need a very strong justification for asking for long-term funding. We get our funding allotments in five-year increments. So we cannot fund a project for longer than three or four years and then we have to write a new contract. So the idea with this is you would do a first cycle and then you'd come back and get funding for a second cycle without having to go through the application process again. So we recognize that there are some projects that take long enough to set up that you will have no results at the end of those three or four years and this long-term option is designed for those kinds of projects. We know that nearly every research project leads to more questions that could be answered with another set of funding, but those should just come through the typical system. These really are for ones that can only be done by getting funding for longer than three or four years and again I would say if you want to apply for that please contact me and we can talk about it and see whether that fits for your idea. You can go to the next slide. So there are a couple of things that I always tell people and they call me about applying for the research and education grant program. The first one I've already said several times, engage farmers and ranchers. The second one is download and read the call for proposals. We give a lot of the information in the online application but there's more information in the call for proposals so please download that. You'll see in this slide the call was not listed in the system yet. It is now there and so you can go to the website northcentralsear.org and download the call for proposals and as I said this webinar will also be in that same spot both the reported webinar as well as a PDF of these slides with the notes so you can use that as a tool as well for your application. Next slide Marie. We do have some resources for applying for a grant that you can look up as well on our northcentralsear website so be sure to check those out. Next slide. This is another main thing you should do in preparing for proposals. So all of our projects are on project all of the reports from past projects from the past 30 years are in at this website projects.serre.org. You search for projects and you can search by keywords and look at past serre projects to see how your work differs or builds on past projects and I find that reviewers really like that when you do that especially at the pre-proposal level so if you know they would tend to say well this has been done before but you've said well this was done in this region but we're you know we have much lower rainfall or something like that it really is impactful so I would suggest that you look up past serre projects to see what's been done in this area already. Next slide. And then this is another very important resource for you that you should take advantage of. So each of our states has someone who does outreach for serre each of our 12 upper midwest states I should say and if you go to the northcentralsear website click on that state coordinators one you'll you'll get the contact information for the person in your state. I will answer general questions about your proposal but your state coordinator often can do a lot of things like maybe connect you to others working in that area connect you to farmers or ranchers who are working that area and some of them will really talk through your idea even look over maybe a draft of your proposal if they have time so definitely be in touch with your state coordinator to talk about your idea and your pre-proposal as you develop it. Next slide. So I'm just going to again quickly run through the actual aspects of the online proposal application so the cover material is you know pretty general information. We do like to know whether your project is going to focus on socially disadvantaged or limited resource farmers and as you'll see there there is a spot for you to check whether you are applying for the long-term funding option. Go to the next slide Marie. And then the first set of questions I think that you asked on the application are you know how do your project outcomes align with NCRSARES outcomes so again this is where you're looking at the three aspects of sustainability. We understand that your project likely emphasizes one of those over the other two but you should still give some thought to how what the what the outcomes are for those other aspects of sustainability. And go to the next slide Marie. So the main part of it is again this is fairly typical project summary your objectives and your outcomes and again I'll give you a little bit more information about what your outcomes should look like. Relevance to sustainable agriculture in our region again a great thing to include there is what past projects have done in this area past SARE projects by going to our data our reporting system database and then again you will give brief information about method and approach. There is no specific place there's not a separate attachment there are no attachments allowed to the proposed the pre-proposal I should say. We don't expect to have literature citations here but if you do need to include some critical aspects if it's a new approach or method or if it's a revolutionary concept that you want to cite you can do that within the within the text but it is a part of the word limits. You can go to the next one Marie. I guess so what what I should have mentioned on the last one you don't need to go back Marie because what's not there is a budget. We do not require a budget at the pre-proposal level we've done that to shorten it at this point it's kind of like a long letter of intent because we get so many pre-proposal applications we wanted to make it easier for applicants to kind of vet their idea see if their concept fits without having to put together a whole budget and all of that so there is no budget we do ask you for a range of spending just so we have an idea of what you're planning to do so that is something that's a checklist on that cover page as well but you do not have to complete a budget. I just want to say a little bit about outcomes so outcomes as I've said are not necessarily the results from research but it's what you want to happen as a result of you doing your project and this mostly comes from the the training or the sharing of information that you do so if your project is an education project so that means the whole three years you're probably going to be doing workshops for example you're doing post-harvest handling workshops then you're going to do those workshops and we track learning outcomes and those can happen pretty quickly so those are things like knowledge awareness attitude or skills that have been improved and those are the things you can document at the end of a workshop did I you know how many people learned something new and then there are action outcomes so that will maybe actually be going in and checking later to see if farmers used the information you know did they make changes to their system so learning outcomes from this would maybe be farmers will learn post-harvest handling and packing techniques for sales to institutions then the action outcome would come from farmers actually increasing their sales to institutions by implementing these practices so for a research focus project you can move on to the next slide that may work a little differently because basically what you're doing for two or three years are probably collecting data to come up with research which might lead to recommendations for farmers or ranchers so really you're going to be doing your outreach mostly at the end of that project so we would expect your your learning outcomes maybe to be similar that farmers are going to learn what you've discovered through your research but because it's coming at the end of your two or three years you may not have time to track action counts outcomes from that so in this example if you're looking at how diversity affects pollinators the learning outcome might be that they learn which plants to plant or what works the best but they may not have time to implement that or you may not be able to track that in your in your work so we just kind of wanted to clarify what we're kind of looking for in terms of learning and action outcomes and what the expectation is you can go to the next slide so the other aspects of the pre-proposal again it's fairly short or just kind of listing your team members and their basic expertise farmer rancher engagement again how are farmers and ranchers involved in this research should they come up with the idea are they helping to formulate the treat you know think about the treatments are they part of an advisory committee are they engaged are they working with you on the outreach which is a you know very effective way to do outreach and then there is a section there statement regarding resubmitted ideas so if you have submitted in the past you've got review comments and you're coming back that's really a great space to take advantage of how you have addressed the reviews from last time and that's another thing that reviewers really look at and find impactful if you say well we were told this so we've done this differently or you say well we were told this but here's the reason we did it this way and we think that's a good idea and you convince them you know that's a good space for you to do that you can go to the next one okay I think this is one of my last slides so this is the timeline again they're due uh online by four o'clock central daylight time on thursday october 13th you'll be notified whether you're invited to submit a full proposal or not in february the full proposals are due in april the the technical committee reviews those full proposals the administrative council decides which ones to fund in july and the awards are you're notified in august and the award officers are sent and then the budgets get reviewed the contract gets set up and the funds are not available until november first 2023 so that's a year from now because we have a pre-proposal process it is a long time till the funding is available and then there's some reporting requirements on there too so one reports would be due so one of the things i'm going to mention about other grant programs so i told you you might be interested in the partnership grant program and we actually have a webinar for applying for that on monday at two o'clock i'm looking at my calendar marie can put that in the chat the registration for that if you're interested so the partnership refers to an ag professional working together with three or more farmers to solve a problem they're $50,000 so they're not as much money but if you have a scaled down version of your idea that you want to use that can be a great way to kind of get started maybe use it as a stepping stone to get an r&e grant or another larger r&e grant so i would suggest you take a look at that call as well to see if that might be something that would work for you and the success rate in that program in the last couple years has been about 35 percent so we fund about a third of the proposals that come in through the partnership grant program those are due a week after these pre-proposals are due so that's kind of the downside they're due october 20th and they are a full proposal they do require a budget so if you're you'll have they'll have to go through your grants office as well pre-proposals don't necessarily have to go through your grants office you'll need to check with them but if there's not a budget they often feel they don't need to see them so so i would just put in a little plug for thinking about the partnership grant program as well and the last slide is contact information for me and you are welcome to email me or call me to talk about your idea if you have specific questions about it again you should also contact your state coordinator and i'll just add that i am available tomorrow and i'm quite available next week after that i have a lot of travel so if you have some ideas and want to get in touch next week would be great with that i'm going to ask shannon if she wants to jump in shannon has been a valued ac member and you can tell a little bit more about your affiliations for for many years we are very lucky to have her and so she's read a lot of pre-proposals over the years and i think she'll have some ideas um for you as a reviewer thanks can you hear me okay beth yes so um my name is shannon osborne i am a research agronomist with the usda ars in brickeen south dakota and so i have been involved with ser um for a long time sure how long i was on the technical committee for the rne grants first and then um reviewing the proposals and then over the last i think six or seven years i have been on the administrative council as the ars rep and now i am the chair of the technical committee um that oversees these grants and i guess um the tips i had as i was listening to um beth's proposal was first and foremost make sure you read the all of the things that come in the call for proposal and read those instructions and there's a lot of resources on the website for seyer and um know that the people who are reviewing the information also have read the full call for proposals and they have access to those same resources and so we utilize those resources to help us gauge how we are we are reviewing those proposals so please take the time to read the instructions follow the instructions um the staff beth is a great resource um to bounce ideas off of ask questions so make sure that you utilize those things um as much as you can also make sure that your proposal is straightforward and the people who are going to be reviewing your proposal proposal might not be an expert in the area that your proposal is and so know that the administrative council and the reviewers are made up of people that have a lot of different backgrounds we have um soils people we have horticulturalists we have producers on the panel um we have people within education economics it's it's a broad group of people that you're writing these proposals to so you have to have enough detail but make sure that it's understandable by a large number of people um again make sure that you address all of those required categories um beth talked about the three legs um and we want you to specifically say how you are addressing those three legs that social sustainability website that was up on um that's on the website it is very useful you know for me I am a soils person I didn't start thinking about the social sustainability aspect until I became a part of SARE and so those resources are very beneficial in me and thinking about those types of things so utilize those when writing your proposals and then finally you know it is as Beth stated it is a grassroots grant program and so involvement of producers or the end user of the research or the education that you're doing might not necessarily be a producer but who are those end users that are going to impact sustainable ag how are they impacted by the research that you're doing and how are they involved can you get them involved in the proposal so for one example you know if you're doing some things that um with livestock that have different treatments what are some things that they utilized and how might they like to address some of the treatments those types of things so however you can get that end user producer involved within your grant I think is very beneficial for the grant but it's also beneficial for you and thinking a bigger picture about how you address these things within your career so I think those are kind of the notes that I took down the that long term make sure that if you're thinking about that long term option that before you commit to that long term option you have a conversation with Beth about what your ideas are and if we as a committee would actually consider that to be long term or just the base project that could be built upon for other projects I think that's it Beth that's great thanks Shannon yeah I think Shannon hit some really important points so uh that's really good um we can take questions now we'll take general questions uh and then have Maria Marie pull up the website for projects.sare if you're not familiar with it but first let's take some general questions Marie do you have some to pass along or yeah there's several questions in the chat did you want me to read them to you yes okay I don't have the chat up great um first question and I'm going to just use first names from people so I apologize in advance if I looked at your name quite right the first question was from alphons um wondering if they can get the documents of this meeting to help share with others yes alphons I posted a link in the chat for where you can get a copy of this slideshow downloadable as either the powerpoint or as a pdf that has all of the notes um as well as event this is going to be recorded this actual session um as a video and then posted to that website as well as probably later today hopefully um so there's there's going to be resources at that link next question is from hailey and this one's for you Beth can projects incorporate both research and education components yes thank you for asking that because I left out a critical part of the presentation so one of the things there also insists on is outreach or education so even if you are doing a research project yes you should be including outreach or education we look to share that information with the end users so yes it should include both you'll see there's a question on the cover page that says is this research focused or education focused and kind of which one you mark kind of goes to that what I was talking about with the outcomes so for research focused projects you might not have as many action outcomes from that for an education demonstration project the emphasis might be on those uh measuring those changes in behavior or those action outcomes so I hope that answers your question hailey and thank you for reminding me to say that next question is from joseph wondering um our consultant fees that work on a project a direct or indirect cost uh those are direct costs so indirect are just um and again you can call us with questions about the budgeting although uh you know you're not doing a budget for this one so but but I understand that you are still going to be sketching things out on a worksheet certainly for for the application in case you're with the hope that you will be invited for a full proposal um so indirect costs are overhead costs people call them different different organizations call them different things but that the overhead costs that the institution usually takes out and it's 10 percent so consultant fees fees for service those are all part of direct costs next question is from now run on how do you value innovation or research of an illiterate farmer how do you help substantiate his her idea into research and education so that's a good question and one we have been struggling with we have been uh thinking of first of all trying to make our working to make our materials work for low literacy groups we've talked about doing video applications not for this project but more for the farmer rancher project if you are asking this as a researcher for how you would involve those farmers in your work you know you can do video things and that that can be a part of your proposal is that you are going to produce videos for your audience either if they are english's second language or don't read or write well so I hope that answers the question that's kind of a general question certainly something that's on our minds we currently as an applicant for the research and education program we only accept proposals online so you you do have to have that literacy baseline to apply to this grant program and another question from joseph do proposals compete across their regions meaning if one project is similar to another project in another region will they compete against each other or could they both be funded they can both be funded so we don't we're pretty independent we don't see the proposals from other regions so that's all handled within our north central region um and in fact I usually get a question the other way which is two proposals that are similar that kind of want to cooperate do we have a way to see if they're both funded and and we don't we don't have a way to go across regional boundaries very easily to fund projects so we usually just recommend that people you know apply in both areas or in both regions um but not make them dependent on getting funding in the other region but uh it would be fine to apply in both regions we we know once projects are funded so pre-proposals that's all confidential um once a project is funded it becomes public information that's when we would know okay and the next question is from crystal do you have any grants that would be for international research and education we do not uh ser does not we're pretty small grant program and we don't have international don't fund international program and the next question is from vinaigrette not to sound over confident but this is more of a timeline constraint on our side we will need to be working on a full proposal draft earlier this winter I was wondering if it's possible to make the full proposal that it's available to applicants in advance of the February date on that timeline so we don't do that because it doesn't get approved until January actually but the call for proposals does not change drastically I can't remember if we have a sample call for proposals if you'll contact me I can send you the last years as a sample knowing that that may not be exactly what the call will be when it's approved in January I'm not sure that we post it because it is by invitation only so I don't we don't have a sample up either do we have a sample of the pre-proposal but not a call for full proposal yeah um John asked me asked if we can repost a link I'm not sure which link you needed John um if I didn't get the link in the chat that you needed can you just put in the chat which link you're referring to and I'll repost it um question from Keith are there specific topics for research of high interest for sarah north central uh we do not have priorities for research generally and that is a discussion every year by our administrative council um they feel that the good ideas come from the grassroots so I would just say in turn we are a USDA program if you've looked at the USDA's priorities you know that they are looking for things like climate resilience those types of things I think are of interest but we do not have priorities and every year we fund a broad spectrum of projects I don't know Shannon do you I'll catch you off guard a little bit do you have anything to add to that um no I guess you know what you said we really try not to constraint what it is that people propose because it is such a broad group and you know um innovative ideas that solve problems um yeah I don't think there is certain high priority areas it's just really the target of solving solutions or solving problems with solutions you know that are that are applied thanks next question is from sarah for the methods section are you looking for a timeline of when activities will take place for more of a high level summary of how pieces will fit together um more that high level not a timeline at the pre-proposal level so at the full proposal level a timeline would be helpful and it kind of depends I guess if you're doing an education only proposal and that is part of your method and approach is kind of what's going to follow from one other thing you could include the sequence of events I don't know if that answers your question again if it's more specific than that um you can please contact me and we can talk about it from Keith any limitation on submitting one topic under research and another topic appropriate for farmer partnership during the same year so do you so I'm not sure if you're asking if you can submit two within the RNA pre-proposal process which you actually can do that um it's a little tricky but you can do that you can talk to me or but if you're talking about submitting both an RNA pre-proposal and a partnership grant program proposal yes you can and I sometimes encourage people to do that um for one thing that again I forgot to mention the research and education proposals the funding is available November 1st 2023 partnership proposal funding is available April 1st 2023 so you you get a start ahead of the growing season so yes you can apply for both the 2023 partnership and the RNA pre-proposal you find out at the same time so you'll find out if your proposal for partnership is funded and you'll find out if your pre-proposal is being invited for a full proposal uh in early fe- mid February to late February question from Joseph if we have partners is it best to put letters of intent in the pre-proposal or in the proposal process in the proposal no attachments in the pre-proposal it's a very simple pre-proposal we don't even ask for a CV we just ask for CVs for the PIs we just ask for I think a short bio that's within the proposal itself um from Gabriel can small businesses that partner with farmers are improved approved for government contracts through SAM and are conducting fundamental applied research apply for this grant yes probably call me so it can go to private entities so yes I would just say the one thing we sometimes run into with that is we don't do product testing so if you're testing one specific product that could be an issue and then Gabriel's follow-up question was additionally is it encouraged to orient research towards long-term projects if they can be or not um again call me so it is the only thing I'll say about the long-term projects and Shannon is smiling it's a tough cut so this is basically our administrative council uh you know promising future money to go to this research so they're tough on them so certainly if you have a project that qualifies for that and can go you know get additional funding without having to go through the application process that's a great thing but they are really tough on it we do have at the pre-proposal level the ability to change your mind like they can look at it and say this is a good pre-proposal but it is not a long-term proposal and then you could if we invite you you could come back as a short-term proposal if you apply at the full proposal level for long-term you're either funded long-term or you're not funded so it's a little complex we've been working it out as we go along we think we've settled on this as the way it works best and you just touched on this a little bit Steven asked when you look at long-term funding can the proposal go beyond $250,000 and what would you consider long-term? So the way the long-term works and and I think we sort of spell this we do spell it out in the call for proposals is you get funding for the first cycle for $250,000 for the first three years and then we'll do a review we were talking about doing site visits kind of a pretty rigorous review to make sure you're making progress as you'd hoped and then we'll give you a new contract for another three years so you write out a new work plan for the rest of the work for the next three years for an additional $250,000 and we talked about that being it could either be two cycles or it could be three cycles so it could be six to nine years and you would get $250,000 for each of those three-year cycles. Haley asks if we have data that needs further analysis to allow us to best conduct the education component does that further data analysis count as a research component? Maybe it could I mean it could be part of the work you put in I would still say it's an education focus proposal and I will say that education focus does not have to have research in it so yeah you would just kind of explain that I think in your in your pre-proposal. And a question from Jen, do we need a formal commitment from each of the farmers to be a part of the project proposed in the grant for the Farmer Rancher Involvement Section or just a list of potentially interested farmers based on past partnerships? So I'm going to answer in between those two so you don't need a formal letter because we don't have attached but you will at the full proposal level you will need those letters verifying participation. At the pre-proposal level you can list we we do like to have you list them and maybe have spoken with them at least and and have an idea that they'd like to be involved so we know who they are and also because sometimes you think you'll get farmers involved and then they're really busy and you're unable to so we do want to have them identified I think what we say in the call for proposals is identified or tell us why you can't identify them at this time but you don't need letters from them you will at the full proposal level. And that is the end of the questions in the chat Beth. That's the thank yous. Well does anyone else have any questions before we move on to like this next section we still have about 60 participants on the on the zoom right now. Okay. One last question came straggling in in the chat from Mitchell can you talk about the youth educator grants? So I could but so I'll just say that they're small grants they're $6,000 and they are to go to someone who is teaching sustainable ag concepts but there is a webinar scheduled for the youth educator program and I don't know Marie do you have your calendar up can you look? Yeah I can put the link in the chat actually. Okay that'd be great so I would suggest you tune in for that and Joan Benjamin that call for proposals is also listed on our North Central Sierra website so please go pull that up. Joan's contact information is there and then also I would suggest you register for that webinar. So thank you everyone for making the time I know it's a busy time of year I appreciate it. Contact me if you have specific questions about your idea I hope we get a bunch of pre-proposals for those of you who haven't been in SARE projects or projects.sarer.org our online system and would like to just see what it looks like the next thing I'm going to do is have Marie just pull that up open it up for maybe the next five minutes and look so you see what it is but for those of you who don't need that or can navigate the online system on your own we don't use grants.gov so I will say it's our own online application system you're welcome to stay on the line but for the rest of you thank you for joining us and we look forward to getting your pre-proposals. Okay I think we've had a couple other questions sent to me in the chat which I think I addressed. Okay so I will pull up I've already logged in Beth so that's okay so when when you go to projects.sarer.org and again we have screenshots of all of this in the online PDF of my presentation so what I took out of the slide deck that I went through today were screenshots of every step of the program of applying so you will see those there as well and the first thing you do is you log in and you do an account you have to answer some demographic information and some institutional information and then you're in the system and then once you're registered so Marie has registered and she wants to start a new grant proposal and this is for the whole system so one of the things you need to make go ahead Marie so one of the things you need to do is make sure you pick our region we all have different grant application times so you want to make sure you pick the north central region and you want to pick for this one the R&E pre-proposal so now note that the rest of the ones that are open are in there so someone asked about the youth educator you can start one there you could pull down the call for proposals there as well and the partnership grant is the other one that I suggested you consider as well not as much money but higher success rate so go ahead and open the begin a new proposal uh under yep thanks Marie your internet slowed today Marie maybe because I'm hosting the zoom while that that could be it well it it will go a lot faster on your system I think so it usually doesn't take that law I don't recommend trying to fill out your proposal while you're hosting this thing there we go so this is this is what it looks like so you'll see your project title project coordinator is in there you keep scrolling down Marie so yeah you can hold it there so view draft at any time if you want to look at what you're writing and what it looks like which won't there won't be anything there now but you can use that it also gives you a link so you cannot have collaborators go in and work on your same proposal so there's just there's one law unless you get them your login information so but you can share your draft with collaborators so that will also give you a link that you can send to them so they can look at it um yeah but they can't go in and make changes on your proposal unless you give them your login information so as I said there's a cover section you know that you open up and just fill out kind of that standard information that you normally fill out the impact on sustainable agriculture in the north central region you could go ahead and open that up Marie because again I told you to think about how your proposal fits those three areas and you have to come up with something so because uh you have to explain how it will affect it economically environmentally and socially and again the red asterisks means that those are required sections that you have to complete once you complete it you get a green check that lets you know you can move forward and you'll see down there in the bottom right you got you can move to the next section which would be the body of the proposal you can go back to the previous section which was your cover page your overview you can view the draft uh so a lot of nice buttons this is a system that got set up for us about I don't know maybe four or five years ago three years ago I guess now that we've just been really happy with it so I hope you'll find it easy to use as well and then again the body um which goes through those main sections that I talked about the project summary and there are word limits for most of these that are they'll be listed when you open the section but they are also listed in the call for proposals so I will say one thing to remember to do so if you type in all 250 words and forget to hit save down there at the bottom you will lose it so it's not so bad in these small preproposals but uh when you're putting a budget together we tell people just save every time if you get called away from your computer it will not have saved what you've written unless you click on save so as you can see Marie answered that and now she's got a green check when you have all those required aspects uh filled out in a certain section and you go back to the overview you'll have a green check by that part uh yeah I think you can go back to the I'm I know I'm kind of racing through this again all those screenshots are in that PDF that's available on the north central sera website along with the call for proposals so you will notice there is not a submit button here you do not get the submit button until you have green checks by all those required components um so once those are completed and you have green checks you will have a submit button there uh and then you can click on it and submit it you can also now unsubmit your application if you you know read through the draft after you've submitted and you see there's a problem before the deadline you can unsubmit just make sure you resubmit before the deadline which is again Thursday October 13th at four o'clock so that's the system it's not sometimes people get confused this is separate from our website the north central sera website this is projects.sera.org that uh that link is plastered big throughout the call for proposals so uh you hopefully won't miss that my contact information is also in the call for proposals um I think those are the main points of applying in the system uh so again if you have questions you can either contact the mcr sera office uh jean can sure help you through the application process um contact questions or proposal um application online system questions you can ask me as well um there is on the online application if you have technical problems things are loading too slowly or something like that or you think you've done something right and technically the system doesn't seem to be working you can also email projects at sera.org and that's again in the system itself and they are really good about trying to fix technical glitches um and and getting you in the system I see we I don't know if you can hear the tapping outside so we are uh our building is being re-roofed and they they've just decided right outside my office to start pounding so I think that's a good indication it's a good time to end the webinar are there any other questions yeah I know if if not uh thank you Shannon Aaron and Marie for uh helping to put this on thank all of you for attending and again we look forward to getting preproposals from you