TOP 5 TIPS TO MAKE YOUR AGRICULTURE, WATER, AND LAND CHALLENGE APPLICATION STAND OUT

You’ve got a technology that could change how Alberta grows food, treats water, restores land, or handles waste. Now you must show a review panel that it’s ready for the field, and that ERA funding is what will get it there.

The Agriculture, Water, and Land Challenge has up to $60 million to move agriculture, forestry, water, land, and waste technologies from pilot to practice. Applications are due December 16, 2026, at 5:00 p.m. Mountain Time, and we expect a competitive process.

The most important thing you can do is make a clear case for why your project should be funded. These five tips will help you do it.

1. Start now

Writing the application doesn’t take that long. Lining up what’s behind it does.

Strong applications show readiness to proceed, and readiness takes time to build. Before you draft a word, line up your project partners and end users, your site, your financing plan, and any letters of support.

Then check your access to Grant Manager, ERA’s online application portal. No account? Register. Already have one? Log in and confirm you still have access. A login problem is no way to spend the last week before a deadline.

2. Read the Call before you write a word

The Call for Expressions of Interest answers most of the questions we hear. Read it first, along with the FAQ and the EOI template.

If your project isn’t eligible or doesn’t fit this Call, you’ll save yourself a lot of time by knowing that early. Three things to check right away:

• Project stage: Projects must reach field pilot, demonstration, or first-of-kind commercial implementation by completion, and must be piloted, demonstrated or deployed in Alberta.
• What’s out of scope: Standalone lab research, feasibility studies and software without field deployment, business-as-usual projects, policy development, and projects that only address a financial gap are not eligible.
• Funding terms: Up to $10 million per project, with a matching at least 1:1 by private funding.

Still not sure? Email applications@eralberta.ca. ERA’s team can answer questions about the guidelines, the template, and project alignment. They cannot review or give feedback on draft proposal content, and responses can take up to a week, so ask early.

3. Put your effort where the points are

Every proposal is assessed against the same evaluation criteria, and each one carries a different weighting. They’re all important, but put extra effort into the ones with the most weight.

Criterion	Weight
Greenhouse gas reductions and environmental benefits	25
Readiness and implementation	20
Socio-economic benefits	20
Commercial potential	20
Technology opportunity	15
TOTAL	100

Environmental benefits carry the most weight, followed by readiness, socio-economic benefits, and commercial potential at 20 points each. Don’t leave any criterion thin: a strong technology with a vague delivery plan is less compelling than a proposal that’s solid across the board. The prompts in the EOI template spell out what each criterion covers, so make sure your EOI addresses each one.

4. Make the case, and back it with evidence

This is a competitive process, and only the highest-quality EOIs are invited to submit a Full Project Proposal. Quality means both the strength of your project and the clarity and completeness of your writing. The EOIs that succeed tend to do these things:

• Start with the end user. Define the need your project addresses, and show meaningful participation or validation from the producers, processors, operators, municipalities, landowners, or others who would use the solution.
• Quantify your claims. Support major claims with data, analysis, or clear rationale, and set out credible baselines for the environmental and economic benefits you expect in Alberta.
• Beat the alternatives, on paper. Explain why your approach outperforms incumbents and emerging options, using quantitative metrics where you can.
• Name your risks. Identify the key technical, commercial, regulatory, financing and adoption risks, and show how your work plan addresses them.
• Show you’re ready to go. Present a clear scope, timeline, milestones, partner team, and financing pathway. A high-level Gantt chart helps. Confirmed elements are best, but a clear line of sight to securing them also counts.
• Plan beyond the funded project. Show customer or market pull, a viable business model, and how the solution can scale and be adopted more widely.

Be clear about novelty and additionality, too. Explain why your project goes beyond business as usual and how ERA funding makes it happen.

5. Sweat the details, then submit early

A strong project can still lose ground to avoidable errors, and late, partial or incomplete submissions will not be accepted. Use this checklist:

• Use the EOI response template from Grant Manager.
• Keep your EOI to 10 letter-sized pages in PDF, using Calibri or Arial 11-point font and 1-inch margins. Extra pages are removed and not evaluated.
• Include the required attachments: the milestone summary table and the mass and energy balance. Letters of support are optional and should be combined into a single PDF.
• Keep file names short (30 characters or fewer, no special characters) and include the proposal number assigned by Grant Manager.
• Finalize every step in Grant Manager, then look for the automatic confirmation email. If it doesn’t arrive, check your junk folder and the status of your submission, and contact IMS@eralberta.ca if needed.

Only the required documents are reviewed, so extra attachments won’t help. Submit early, so there’s time to fix a problem before the deadline.