Pennsylvania Will Pay Up to $15,000 Toward Planning the Future of Your Farm
PA Farm Vitality Planning Grants cover up to 75 percent of the cost of business, succession, or transition planning for Pennsylvania farms. Applications are open until the money runs out.
Ask a farm family around here what keeps them up at night and you will not usually hear about weather. You will hear some version of: what happens to this place when I cannot work it anymore.
Answering that question properly costs money. An accountant, a lawyer, sometimes an appraiser. It is the kind of bill that keeps getting pushed to next year until it becomes an emergency.
Pennsylvania has a program for exactly that, and it is open right now.
What the grant covers
The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture is accepting applications for Farm Vitality Planning Grants of up to $15,000 per farm. The grant covers up to 75 percent of eligible project planning costs. The 2026-27 state budget put $500,000 into the program.
Three kinds of planning qualify:
- Business planning to expand an operation or add a new income stream
- Succession planning to hand the farm to the next generation
- Transition planning for a sale to a new owner
The grants come out of the PA Farm Bill, the state program created in 2019, and are run through the Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Business Development Center. To date the program has funded more than $3.8 million in planning work for 482 Pennsylvania farms. In 2025 the maximum award was doubled to the current $15,000 after farmers told the department that professional planning services cost more than the old cap covered.
Who it is for around here
Somerset and Fayette county operations are the profile this program was built for. Small dairies. Maple producers in the Meyersdale and Grantsville corridor. Beef and hay ground on the ridges. Family operations where the paperwork side has never gotten the same attention as the field side.
It is also worth a look if you are on the buying end. The Farm Vitality grant stacks with other PA Farm Bill programs, including:
- The Beginning Farmer Tax Credit, which gives a tax credit to people who sell or rent farm assets to a beginning farmer. Eighty-eight farm owners have used it, saving more than $1.7 million collectively.
- The Beginning Farmer Realty Transfer Tax Exemption, which has covered 82 beginning farmers buying preserved farms and generated $918,269 in tax savings.
- The Next Generation Farmer Loan Program, which uses federal tax-exempt financing to knock down interest rates on capital purchases. One hundred twenty-two farmers have qualified for more than $70 million in low-interest loans.
How to apply
Applications go through the Department of Community and Economic Development’s single electronic application at grants.pa.gov. Full program guidelines ran in the August 8 edition of the Pennsylvania Bulletin.
There is no posted deadline. Applications are accepted until the funds are spent, which is another way of saying the deadline is whenever the money runs out. With $500,000 in the pot and a $15,000 ceiling, that math does not stretch very far.
More information on planning resources and financing is available through the Agricultural Business Development Center at agriculture.pa.gov.