Never-Before-Seen Spatial Data Will Be Available for Farmers and Ranchers

USDA Embarks on Ambitious GIS Implementation

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has seen a tremendous transformation since President Lincoln established the organization in 1862. At that time, 90 percent of the country's population consisted of farmers. Today, with just 2 percent of the U.S. population consisting of farmers and with an overall population well beyond 1862 numbers, the USDA must provide better, faster, and more effective solutions to the needs of both farmer and consumer alike.

What kinds of solutions? The USDA must help provide a more productive agriculture, a safe and abundant food supply, and stewardship of natural resources. In addition, the USDA must continue with these efforts while at the same time lending help in the overall effort to streamline government that works better and costs less. To do this, the USDA is embracing technology, and part of this effort includes GIS.

"We have been involved in a modernization effort since 1995," says Dennis Lytle, Business modernization leader, USDA. "This includes establishment of colocated offices; a common local area network; Internet service and phone system; and a common computing environment, data management processes, and Business process reengineering. GIS is part of the reengineering of our Business processes."

After an extensive benchmarking period that lasted more than a year, the USDA selected Esri to provide software and services for a landmark GIS implementation that will change the way map data is managed by the government and used by consumers. The USDA will acquire ArcInfo 8, ArcSDE, ArcIMS, and ArcView GIS.

"It's an honor to have been selected to serve the USDA for their diverse needs," says Jack Dangermond, president, Esri. "We are looking forward to providing the very finest technology tools and services we have to offer. Our goal is to enable the USDA to better serve its customers, and we are proud to be able to serve them in this manner."

There are a number of strategic needs the GIS will meet, including the need to keep existing Business functions operating at optimum levels, which is no easy task when you consider the dramatic downsizing the USDA has experienced in recent years. From 1993 to the present, the workforce for USDA has fallen 22 percent or about 10,000 staff. USDA agencies will provide an estimated $55 billion in farm, conservation, and rural development services in the fiscal year 2000. In addition, the current information technology infrastructure is expensive to maintain and operate. Modernization will not only help the USDA operate efficiently even with a smaller staff, it will help cut IT costs. "The USDA is a very complex organization with an equally complex suite of programs to administer," says John Steffenson, USDA account manager.

According to the USDA, GIS is viewed as technology that can help make large increases in productivity and improvements in customer service. Most of the Business activities of the USDA and partner agencies are associated with the geographic characteristics and related data on soil, water, air, plants, animals, landownership, demographics, and socioeconomics. This extraordinary enterprise implementation will serve agencies in more than 2,500 sites with a workforce of 36,000 Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), Rural Development (RD), and Farm Service Agency (FSA) employees working with an additional 14,000 conservation district employees and volunteers. The long-term objective is to bring GIS technology into every phase of USDA Business. According to estimates, GIS would provide $169 million in annual savings.

Initially, desktop GIS will be deployed in phases to the service centers. At the end of September 2000, about 450 county offices had GIS capabilities. By the end of December 2000 the number will increase to about 1,500. In 2001 an additional 500 to 1,000 offices will be brought online.

Managers will use GIS to measure many performance areas, and they will look to the Web to see and analyze near real-time data using ArcIMS. Data such as soils, field boundaries, climate, and conservation practices will be available online to help determine the most effective conservation practices to use in a given area and decide such things as what kind of crops to plant, how to minimize erosion, and how to protect wetlands, among other things. The system will also be used to manage various USDA farm support programs such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program.

Field office and state office employees will be able to do simple map overlay, analysis, and calculations using ArcView GIS 3.2 and the "toolkit" of custom applications that support conservation planning activities. They will also be able to create and maintain producer land records, such as farm field boundaries and land use information, with custom ArcView GIS tools. These activities will be done on the desktop initially, but in the long term, many of these routine actions, such as calculating the soil erosion rate or changing a farm field boundary, may be accomplished with Web GIS-accessing centralized geodata marts.

In addition, full-time, professional staff, including soil, range, forest science, and agronomy specialists, will use GIS to do complex geographic analysis for solving complex natural resource issues.

Pilot Sites: The Dalles, Oregon, and Rolla, North Dakota

Two pilot sites serve as excellent examples of the benefits to be realized from the implementation. Located along the Columbia River in eastern Oregon, The Dalles USDA site became operational as a pilot site in October 1998.

The Dalles site has been very proactive in their use of ArcView GIS, GPS units, digital cameras, and the Microsoft Office automation suite. The Dalles office began the use of ArcView GIS and a compact disk (CD) writer to prepare conservation plans on a CD. The CD includes conservation plan maps and other documents produced with the Customer Service Toolkit application including digital orthophotography, field boundaries, soil maps, and any of the other data themes available in the field office. The producer can view this data and print it using his or her computer and a downloaded copy of ArcExplorer.

In addition, The Dalles staff developed an ArcView GIS script they call Quick Map. This is a one-button process to print a copy of a producer or other customer's map. Quick Map is easy for staff members who have only limited ArcView GIS skills. It prints a map with tract number, field numbers, and acres; automatically sets up a layout for the photo, scale, and direction; and lists the map preparer.

Located in northcentral North Dakota near the Canadian border, the Rolla Service Center was established in September 1998. Earlier, it had been selected as a Leading Edge Service Center (1996-1997). Leading Edge sites were identified as service centers that made Business process improvements within the scope of existing agency policies. As a Leading Edge site, Rolla established interagency cooperative agreements and acquired a waiver for a centralized hard-copy file system for FSA and NRCS.

This site makes extensive use of ArcView GIS for conservation plans such as plans for the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) that include determining eligibility and working with producers to set up practices such as tree and shrub planting. In addition, the site uses ArcView GIS and the customized Soil Data Viewer to identify and display soil type, characteristics, and interpretations. They routinely make soil loss determinations, design filter strips, and perform may other related activities that once took several hours or were not possible at all.

For more information, contact John Steffenson, Esri-Denver (e-mail: jsteffenson@esri.com, tel.: 303-449-7779, ext. 8237).

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