Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Farm Service Agency works through glitches of using technology to collect crop data online

The Farm Service Agency, which has closed many of its local offices in small counties, is trying to catch up with technology. "Sometime in the future, producers should be able to use precision technology to collect all the data used in their farming operations and send verification via the Internet to their local FSA office or crop insurance agent for collection by the Risk Management Agency," reports Agri-Pulse. "That is our ultimate goal, to be able to have our producers download their equipment to an agent or to a Farm Service Agency office," USDA Undersecretary Michael Scuse told the Washington newsletter.

When the service will be available everywhere and how well it works are the main questions. While MyAgData is already being used in Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky and Minnesota, the programs in Iowa and Illinois have experienced problems with efficiency, Agri-Pulse writes. "The data was collected and matched to the common land units required by USDA acreage and production reporters, but then was printed and has to be hand-entered at the local FSA office."

Despite the glitches, Scuse said considerable progress has been made made in the past three years toward streamlining acreage crop reporting, Agri-Pulse reports: "Step one was to make sure the agencies that identify parcels of land agree to use a common identifier. Step two was to try and consolidate the crop reporting data because there were so many differences between FSA and RMA. The next step was to improve USDA's commodity tables."

Scuse told Agri-Pulse, "We had to put all those records in a stable environment. That was the most critical part. The second part, which were are currently working on, enables us to make payments and things of that nature. That will be released later this fall." Agri-Pulse is subscription only, but a free trial is available by clicking here.

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