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November 2000
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USDA Embarks on Ambitious GIS Implementation
Enterprise GIS Access Will Result in Never-Before-Seen Spatial Data Availability for Farmers, Others
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) service center agencies (Natural Resources Conservation Service, Farm Service Agency, and rural development agencies) selected ESRI to provide software and services for a landmark geographic information system (GIS) implementation that will change the way map data is managed by the government and used by consumers. The USDA will use ArcInfo 8, ArcSDE, ArcIMS, and ArcView GIS. ESRI will provide more than $2 million in software and its acquisition comes after a two-year evaluation and benchmarking period.
"We have been involved in a modernization effort since 1995," says Dennis Lytle, GIS project leader, USDA. "This includes establishment of colocated offices, a common local area network, Internet service and phone system, a common computing environment, data management processes, and business process reengineering. GIS is part of the reengineering of our business processes."
"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 considering the downsizing the USDA has experienced in recent years. From 1993 to the present, the workforce for the USDA has fallen 22 percent or about 10,000 staff-years. These 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 costs.
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, land ownership, demographics, and socioeconomics. This extraordinary enterprise implementation will serve agencies in more than 2,600 sites with a combined workforce of 35,500 from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), Rural Development (RD), and Farm Service Agency (FSA). Employees will be working with an additional 7,000 conservation district employees and 8,000 volunteers. The long-term objective is to bring GIS technology into every phase of USDA business. According to estimates, in the 1997 service center business case GIS would provide $169 million in annual savings. GIS alone counted for 34 percent of the savings in this business case. These savings and a five-to-one benefit/cost ratio were verified through data gathered in piloting GIS applications in 1998 to 1999.
Initially, desktop GIS will be deployed in phases to the services centers. At the end of September 2000, approximately 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 will look to the Web to see and analyze near real-time data 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 and monitor compliance in various USDA farm support programs such as the Conservation Reserve Program.
Field office and state office employees will be able to do simple map overlay, analysis, and calculations using ArcView GIS 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 longer term many of these routine actions, such as calculating the soil erosion rate or changing a farm field boundary, may be accomplished with Web based GIS accessing centralized geodata marts.
In addition, full-time, professional staff that include soil, range, and forest scientists and agronomy and environmental specialists will use GIS to do complex geographic analysis for solving complex natural resource issues. Information on the service center agencies' modernization efforts can be found at http://www.sci.usda.gov/sci/
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