The 2026 VDACS SCBGP cycle is closed. This page monitors the December 2026 RFA window for the 2027 cycle and polls three sources weekly — the VDACS grants page, the USDA AMS SCBGP federal page, and GovDelivery notification lists — so IronRoost doesn't miss the open-application window when it drops. Status snapshot below is updated by a weekly cron.
The cron at jobs/scbgp-2027-cycle-monitor.js fetches each source, scans for positive-match substrings ("2027", "Specialty Crop Block Grant", "Request for Applications") and negative-match substrings ("2026 cycle is closed"), and writes the result to /scbgp-2027-status.json. Status badges below read that JSON on page load.
The official Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services grants index. The 2027 SCBGP Request for Applications will be posted here when it opens — typically a December drop, with the application window running into February. This is the canonical source for the Virginia-specific ceiling, match requirement, and project category list.
vdacs.virginia.gov → sales and consumer services indexThe federal SCBGP landing page. USDA AMS announces state award allocations after VDACS closes its state-level cycle; track this page to confirm the federal funding allocation lands in Virginia’s pool and to catch any program-wide scope/rubric changes that cascade into the 2027 application.
ams.usda.gov → SCBGP federal pageThe state-of-record push-notification channel for VDACS grant announcements. Subscribe at the link below if you are not already on the list — when the 2027 RFA drops, subscribers typically learn about it from this list within the same business day it’s posted to the grants page.
public.govdelivery.com → VDACS subscriber signupSix milestones between now and project start. The countdown labels below compute against the most recent cron run — so the freshness signal and the timeline math stay anchored to the same moment. When the December RFA actually drops, JP — swap in the confirmed date.
The cron deliberately avoids parsing HTML. Two reasons: the three sources render their content through different CMS stacks, and any selector we pick today breaks the next time VDACS refreshes its template. Substring matching on a small set of always-on-the-page strings is robust enough to flip a status badge and avoids the brittleness of HTML scraping.
If the page body contains all three of these substrings, the source flips to open:
2027Specialty Crop Block GrantRequest for ApplicationsIf the page body contains any of these substrings, the source flips to closed — meaning the cycle is still on the 2026 archive page and the 2027 RFA has not yet posted:
2026 cycle is closed2026 application period has endedIf the GET fails outright (DNS, timeout, non-2xx status), the source flips to down. The cron only exits with a non-zero code if all three fetches fail simultaneously — a single failure is a normal blip and the JSON file is still written.
Until the first cron run, every source ships as pending. The stub JSON committed at /scbgp-2027-status.json uses the same label so the page renders cleanly before the schedule is wired up.