You can get research grants from the Federal government, through some universities, that can be pretty substantial. I think you would have to be enrolled with the university to get one though. If you come up with an idea, that has potential for increasing yields, or a new crop, you can get a tremendous amount of funding. Even some bizarre ideas get lots of funding.
I sell to a lot of universities and have helped with a lot of thesis projects. Some have very large budgets. Ohio State University spent around $5400.00 on materials and had a student, but mostly her husband spend a few weeks here working on a loft in one of my barns in exchange for fertile pigeon eggs for a pollution study.
The University of Utah paid me a few thousand a year, for 3 years, on a pigeon louse study. They needed 40 white, 40 black and 40 blue bar homing pigeons at a time.
The University of Louisiana bought 36 ringneck doves from me. They fed them an extremely high fat diet for a few months. They did biopsies on their livers and then offered to send them back to me.
Bowling Green for many years bought every homing pigeon I had to sell, over 10 years old and many down to 8 years old for an age and cognition test.
USDA/APHIS bought 120 "naive" homing pigeons for a bird avoidance, aircraft studay.
A professor at the University of Kentucky bought a lot of fantails from me for a color genetics project. He gave me two, excellent, very detailed books he wrote on color genetics in poultry.
Wilmington College is going to rent white, New Zealand Doe rabbits for an ovulation study next week.
The most interesting federally funded project I worked on was Anne Hamilton's "the event of a thread". I trained 60 homing pigeons to fly over a sheet curtain in a large section of one of my barns. Then shipped them to New York where they flew over a 80 foot high, silk curtain, into a loft suspended over 100 feet in the air, when a bell was wrung. I sent 42 pigeons to the art exhibit and got all back, but one that disappeared. Over 168,000 people went through the exhibit, which was in the enormous Park Armory, right on Central Park in New York. They had an immense budget, courtesy of Uncle Sam.
https://www.armoryonpark.org/programs_events/detail/ann_hamiltonKeith