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 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 are looking to review and redesign surveys to reduce the burden on farmers, so that 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. So those are some things that I think we can address relatively quickly and smoothly.”
Pillar number two involves acreage and yield estimates.
“Goal number two is to enhance acreage and yield estimation, and use the wealth of new tools. You know the timing for this initiative is something that is so perfect. 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 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, to make sure we have the most current, effective way to estimate things through geospatial estimations are passive evaluations. We’re also looking to create a portfolio of approaches, so we’re not relying on any particular one, and we can triangulate, or we can check amongst those to make sure that we’re able to collect and disseminate the most accurate data.”
The third goal is to integrate technology and data platforms.
“This gives us the opportunity to incorporate AI and advanced 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 USDA to reduce cross-agency redundancy. We do have a lot of redundancy in many places. We’re looking to eliminate that and to evaluate secure ways to utilize voluntary access to precision agriculture. The tools that you see over here are things that we want to be able to utilize to maybe help calibrate some of the geospatial imagery, or to do other things that we haven’t previously been able to do.”
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. In that process, we will obviously continue to listen to farmers. That’s a key piece. This is not a one-and-done kind of engagement we’re having here.”