Just as with OPPE 2501 awards, no USDA NIFA Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program (BFRDP) projects were funded in Georgia. While this may simply result from a lack of quality applications originating from the Peach State, it is disheartening to see that the Southeast mostly missed out: two grants in Mississippi, one in New Orleans, one in North Carolina, which sometimes counts as the Southeast and sometimes doesn’t. (For the purposes of reason and logic, I’m not counting Broward County as part of the region. Tallahassee, yes. Miami, no. Ocala, maybe).
Since 2014, the South has gotten a quarter of all BFRDP awards according to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. This year it was less than 10%. Curiously, grants went to some of the least populated states in the nation: Delaware, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Rhode Island. Five projects in the Mid-Atlantic states received funds. To the naked eye, it almost appears as if awards were clustered in certain geographic areas: the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Ohio-Kentucky, Mississippi, Plains-Midwest, Colorado-New Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest.
Having served on three BFRDP review panels, I doubt there’s any grand art or order to the overall selection of awardees. Setting aside the necessity of quality applications across the country, award decisions are often a function of the geographic distribution of reviewers. Because BFRDP review panels are conducted in-person in D.C., the process is more likely to attract reviewers who have the least trouble traveling there. And those people are naturally prejudiced toward what they know.