Natural Resources Conservation Service Chief Aubrey Bettencourt on Tuesday said she hopes to address the longstanding workforce retention issues the agency has long struggled with. One of her first goals in this effort is to ensure offices have reliable internet access, as well as upgraded technology to better help both staff and producers.

“We have a retention issue,” Bettencourt said, noting that is usually a sign employees are either bored or don’t feel supported. She also pointed to connectivity challenges in local offices as a barrier, noting that she knows of offices with “some of the worst internet connectivity I have ever seen.”

“I will die on this hill of internet connectivity to our field offices,” she said. “That is first and foremost. We are going to support the people that support our farmers."

Bettencourt, speaking at Agri-Pulse’s Food and Ag Issues Summit in Sacramento, California, reiterated her goal of improving technology at the agency to improve service for farmers, reducing the time they need to spend away from their fields. 

“We are looking at every aspect of the agency — our policy, our operations, our technology — through the lens of the customer and through the lens of the staff at the front desk, and we are engineering the agency for the future,” Bettencourt said.

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The agency has lost employees in recent months due to buyouts and retirements, though Bettencourt called her team “lean and mean” and said it was trying to “stay on mission and deliver as quickly as we possibly can.” However, she also said, “we are basically fully staffed, from our perspective, and actually expending, which is going to be good."

She also said that as additional leadership gets put in place at the USDA, she anticipates the agency’s productivity will “increase rapidly.”

Bettencourt said once local offices have good internet connectivity, she hopes to integrate in NRCS’s network system “a singular platform that is digitally based,” which would be able to “auto-populate producer applications” and start moving them through paperwork. She compared it to systems currently used to house medical records.

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