---
title: "Funding for Agriculture and Food Science Degrees: Where the Money Actually Is"
description: "Real funding for agriculture, agronomy and food science degrees, and which well-known programmes fund a degree versus only sounding like they do."
url: "https://worldwide-scholarships.com/funding-for-agriculture-and-food-science-degrees-where-the-money-actually-is/"
type: "article"
published: "2026-09-22T00:00:00.000Z"
---

[Financial aid](https://worldwide-scholarships.com/topics/financial-aid/)

# Funding for Agriculture and Food Science Degrees: Where the Money Actually Is

Real funding for agriculture, agronomy and food science degrees, and which well-known programmes fund a degree versus only sounding like they do.

22 September 2026 · Reviewed by the [Worldwide Scholarships editorial team](https://worldwide-scholarships.com/about/)

## Why this field is different to search for

Agriculture and food science funding is scattered across development agencies, foreign ministries, and university-specific funds, rather than sitting in one clear scholarship database. A lot of what comes up in a search is training or mentorship dressed up in scholarship language, not money toward a degree. Before you build an application list, it helps to know which programmes actually pay tuition and which ones are something else entirely.

## The clearest degree funding: Wageningen’s Anne van den Ban Fund

Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands runs one of the more direct routes into a funded agriculture Master’s. The Anne van den Ban Fund covers complete or partial financing of an MSc programme at Wageningen, specifically for students from low-income countries who have already been admitted.

There’s a catch worth knowing before you get your hopes up: you can’t apply to this fund directly. Selection happens once a year among already-admitted students, based on recommendations from study coordinators and alumni networks in developing countries. In practice, that means your first job is getting admitted to a Wageningen MSc programme and making sure your coordinator knows you need funding, not filling out a separate scholarship form. If you’re applying to the Netherlands generally, our guide to [studying in the Netherlands](https://worldwide-scholarships.com/studying-in-the-netherlands-funding-visas-and-how-the-money-works/) covers the visa side of getting there.

## Erasmus Mundus: real money, spread across three countries

The EU’s Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s scholarships fund a different shape of degree: you study at a minimum of three institutions in three different countries as part of one joint programme, rather than staying at a single university. The scholarship, where awarded, covers participation costs and contributes to travel, visa costs, and a living allowance, according to the European Commission’s own programme page. You need a bachelor’s degree, or to be finishing one before the programme starts, and applications generally run between October and January for the following academic year, submitted directly to the institution running the programme you want.

The EU runs a searchable course catalogue rather than a single “agriculture” scholarship, and it includes joint Master’s programmes built specifically around agriculture, food systems, and agricultural policy in a given year’s catalogue. Check the current catalogue for what’s actually running before you assume a specific named programme from a previous year is still open, since Erasmus Mundus programmes rotate in and out.

## The programme that sounds like a degree scholarship but isn’t: Borlaug

The Norman E. Borlaug International Agricultural Science and Technology Fellowship, run by the US Department of Agriculture, gets recommended constantly for agriculture funding, and it’s easy to see why: it’s well known, well funded, and named after a famous agricultural scientist. It is not, however, a degree scholarship. USDA’s own programme description defines it as a placement for early- or mid-career scientists, researchers, or policymakers from developing and middle-income countries, built around 8 to 12 weeks of hands-on mentorship and collaborative research at a US university, research center, or government agency, with a mentor follow-up visit to your home country afterward. If you’re mid-career and want a structured research collaboration, it’s worth pursuing. If you’re a student looking to fund a degree, it won’t do that for you.

## A general route that happens to cover agriculture: DAAD Research Grants

Germany’s DAAD runs a doctoral research grant that isn’t agriculture-specific but is open to every academic field, agriculture included, and the numbers are concrete. It pays a monthly stipend of €1,400, funds up to four years of doctoral study, and adds health, accident and personal liability insurance, a travel allowance on application, an annual research allowance of €460, and, once funding starts, optional extras such as a rent subsidy or a family allowance for accompanying dependants. You generally need a Master’s degree or Diplom (in exceptional cases a Bachelor’s), and your most recent degree should have been obtained no more than six years before the application deadline. Because it covers every field, it’s worth checking even if nothing agriculture-specific fits your situation. Our guide to [funding a PhD](https://worldwide-scholarships.com/funding-a-phd-how-the-money-actually-works/) covers how doctoral funding differs from Master’s-level funding more broadly.

## One that closed: the Orange Knowledge Programme

If you search for Dutch agriculture and food security funding, the Orange Knowledge Programme (OKP) will come up repeatedly, often on pages that don’t mention it has ended. Nuffic’s own overview confirms OKP ran from 2017 to 2024, funding almost 11,000 individual scholarships alongside hundreds of training and project grants, with a total budget of €260 million. Nuffic’s pages give the country count inconsistently, once as 53 and once as 55, so treat “dozens of partner countries” as the safe way to describe its reach rather than repeating either figure as exact. As of this writing, Nuffic’s materials don’t list a successor programme. Don’t spend time preparing an application for it; check Nuffic’s current scholarship listings instead for whatever has replaced it, if anything has.

## What this adds up to

If you’re aiming for a taught Master’s, Wageningen and the Erasmus Mundus catalogue are the two routes most likely to actually fund your tuition, and they work very differently: one requires you to get admitted first and get flagged for funding by your programme, the other requires you to apply directly to a joint programme with its own deadline. If you’re aiming for a PhD, DAAD’s general doctoral funding is worth checking even though it isn’t sector-specific, because the amounts and terms are published and predictable. And if a “fellowship” comes up that promises prestige and a US placement but describes itself as mentorship rather than a degree, that’s Borlaug, and it’s a different kind of opportunity than the one you’re likely looking for. Given how much funding in this field sits with development agencies and government science bodies rather than universities, it’s also worth checking whether your own country’s agriculture or foreign affairs ministry runs a bilateral scholarship route, since those rarely show up in general scholarship search engines. If you’re applying from a lower-income country, our guide on [funding for students from developing countries](https://worldwide-scholarships.com/fully-funded-scholarships-for-students-from-developing-countries-in-2026/) covers routes that aren’t specific to any one field.

## Sources

Every deadline and award amount above was checked against these pages before publication.

1.  [The Anne van den Ban Fund at Wageningen University covers complete or partial financing of](https://www.wur.nl/en/value-creation-cooperation/benefactors/our-named-funds/scholarships/anne-van-den-ban-fund.htm)
2.  [Erasmus Mundus Joint Master's scholarships fund study at a minimum of three institutions i](https://erasmus-plus.ec.europa.eu/opportunities/individuals/students/erasmus-mundus-joint-masters)
3.  [The Norman E. Borlaug International Agricultural Science and Technology Fellowship is not](https://www.fas.usda.gov/programs/borlaug-fellowship-program)
4.  [DAAD's doctoral Research Grants pay a monthly stipend of €1,400, fund up to four years of](https://www2.daad.de/deutschland/stipendium/datenbank/en/21148-scholarship-database/?detail=57135739)
5.  [The Netherlands' Orange Knowledge Programme, which funded scholarships including in food a](https://www.nuffic.nl/en/subjects/orange-knowledge-programme/orange-knowledge-programme-overview)

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