USDA shares New Data Modernization Plan at Farm Progress Show
During the farm progress show in Boone, Iowa, Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins announced the USDA's new data modernization plan to put farmers first. The plan contains four central pillars. Scott Hutchins, USDA's Undersecretary for Research, Education, and Economics was also at the show in Iowa and talked about the first pillar, which is modernizing the data reporting experience.
"We also were looking to review and redesign surveys to reduce burden on farmers so we can
have pre-filled in data. We hear often that you get an eight-page survey and the first seven pages include requests for information that's already been provided one way or the other," Hutchins said.
Pillar number two involves acreage and yield estimate.
"We have tremendous tools now that we didn't even have a few years ago with regard to satellite imagery. When I was here in 2020, we were just really starting to move down the path of utilizing data from NASA. The accuracy of that data, the ability to use it to make predictions and estimates has been increasing exponentially. And so we're working very closely with NASA right now as well as other companies in order to make sure we have the most current effective way to estimate things through geospatial estimations or passive evaluation," Hutchins said.
The third goal is to integrate technology and data platforms.
"This gives us the opportunity to incorporate AI and advance analytical to improve the efficiency of everything that we do in this space, whether it's for one particular agency or combined agencies, to utilize shared analytical and processing across USA to reduce cross-agency redundancy. We do have a lot of redundancy in many places. We're looking to eliminate that," Hutchins said.
The fourth goal is to expand transparency and trust with producers.
"When we make revisions because we have new data or different data that's significant, it creates a situation where we have to wonder which one of these is accurate or do we have trust in this process? And we know we have to earn that trust. We have to do it continuously. We have to do it with good science and good analytics. And we also need to be much more transparent and talk about not just what we think the answer is in a particular statistic, but how we got there and why we think it's the right answer, at least under the circumstances that we have now," Hutchins said.
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