The Agriculture Department's "one farmer, one file" initiative envisions new ways to report crop acreage and develop conservation plans, and a wholesale overhaul of the department's IT infrastructure, Undersecretary for Farm Production and Conservation Richard Fordyce told Agri-Pulse Wednesday.
In an interview, Fordyce said the initiative aims to improve coordination on paperwork across the Risk Management Agency, Farm Service Agency and Natural Resources Conservation Service while revamping the agency's internal software and data collection systems. USDA staff have been analyzing current forms for information such as program eligibility and conservation compliance to identify opportunities to streamline and consolidate.
The department is shooting for full implementation by 2028.
"We want to ... clean up a lot of the forms, a lot of the processes that farmers that are engaging with RMA, FSA and NRCS have been doing for a long time," Fordyce said.
He also said USDA is looking to rework its underlying IT systems to make them less "siloed" and allow FSA, RMA and NRCS to better share and coordinate data producers have already submitted. He said crop acreage reporting may also be useful for conservation planning activities at NRCS or crop insurance at RMA.
The days of producers having to actually produce information or explain their situations to participate in multiple programs across the agency "will soon be behind us because the agencies will all have access to the same data, the same information, and that's going to be good for staff across the three agencies," Fordyce said.
On crop acreage specifically, Fordyce said USDA plans to use satellite or plane data to identify fields, give producers a paper map to write in their acreage and planting data, and then allow program staff to use that information to print an acreage report. In later phases, he said digital tools may allow farmers to make acreage reports remotely from a mobile device or desktop, and possibly allow for future integration of precision ag data.
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He said the hope on crop acreage reporting is to "vastly reduce the time that staff have devoted to that for decades."
"At the county office level, the idea is that this modernized acreage reporting will really be a help to local county office staff," he said. He said there are similar streamlining efforts underway for NRCS conservation planning.
Fordyce said employees are analyzing how digital tools can be incorporated across other programs and, more broadly, how existing systems can be modernized. He said there are older data collection systems at some agencies "that we can't turn off until we build a new system."
He acknowledged that converting to new tools and data collection methods will take time, noting that "you have to have some new development on the front end before you can retire old systems." Overall, he said the agency is probably looking at a "two-year runway" for implementing the initiative.
When asked about whether the agency has necessary staffing for rolling out the initiative, Fordyce said much of the software development work taking place is being done by contractors. He said by the end of the initiative process, he expects "we're going to see some significant savings in time at the county office."
He did note, however, that there are some county offices with limited staff where the agency is looking to make "strategic hires." Some of these offices lost staff through the deferred resignation program, he said.
While Fordyce acknowledged producers may still see different types of paperwork used in various agency programs, USDA is aiming to rethink its approach to "the foundational kind of paperwork that we find ourselves doing every year."
"It allows us to take kind of like a broad-spectrum look at how that farmer, rancher, landowner, [is] participating with USDA and those farmer-facing agencies," Fordyce said of the initiative.
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