Green Information Technology Strategic Plan - Departmental ...

8.6 FSA Modernization / MIDAS
Background
USDA-Farm Service Agency (FSA) provides several
services and benefits to achieve the mission and goals of the
Department. FSA delivers commodity, credit, conservation,
disaster and emergency assistance programs that help
improve the stability and strength of the agricultural
economy. FSA also hosts and supports the delivery of the
programs to assure the Nation of a stable food supply. The
delivery of these services and benefits to customers (farmers,
ranchers and cooperatives, etc.) is conducted through a
National network of local offices throughout rural America.
Typically, customers make an average of 4 trips annually to
the local County Offices to conduct business with the Farm
Service Agency. The purpose of these trips includes program
application/signup; acreage reporting or certification;
reconciliation of annual data or contract modifications; and
inquiries about additional services and program benefits not
accessible electronically.
When the automated system for program delivery was
developed, cellular telephone, voice over Internet protocol
telephony, and the public Internet were non-existent. The
basic operation of the automated system was designed with
over 17 million lines of COBAL code on the mini computer.
These mini-computers reside and routinely transmit
information to a central mainframe to complete payment
processing in every local county office to ensure the delivery
of farm programs. The current system for delivery of farm
program benefits and services is outdated, unstable, and
lacks necessary support to continue the efficient and costeffective
delivery of farm programs. The system limitations
on the delivery of farm program benefits and services directly
impacts the human activities performed by FSA customers
which result in the environmental impacts related to the
Agency’s carbon footprint measurement.
Significant and numerous program requirements and the
limited accessibility of the current legacy system for electronic
submissions require frequent travel of our customers,
and the utilization of enormous amounts of paper. FSA’s
current systems hardware, mini-computers, and mainframe
computers consume a large amount of electricity.
FSA is currently pursuing significant modernization of
the aging legacy system in order to address the challenges
and opportunities in the rapidly changing legislative
and technology environment. This project is known as
Modernize and Innovate the Delivery of Agriculture Systems
(MIDAS). The MIDAS project includes the acquisition of
a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software product that
Supporting Environmentally Responsible Technology at USDA
will be configurable to meet the legislated mandates and to
deliver farm program benefits and services to our customers.
The COTS solution and proposed hardware architecture
will be housed in an energy efficient data center.
The uSDA-FSA MiDAS iT investment project will reduce
the carbon dioxide emissions related to the delivery of farm
program benefits associated with:
n Hardware/software
n Paper consumption
n Travel to and from the local offices
Current measurement:
—Hardware and Infrastructure
FSA’s legacy system currently operates using over 17 million
lines of COBAL code on 2,555 mini computers located in
approximately 2,277 FSA County Offices.
Farm Service Agency (FSA) spends $3 million for
maintenance iv costs related to the legacy systems. The
estimated carbon emissions use to host and support the
delivery of farm programs based on the current program
activity is 6,680 tons annually. The topography of the
original hardware was to locate a mini-computer in each
county office when communications in the United States
was mostly low speed over twisted pair. These physical
county office locations were not designed with modern data
center power and cooling efficiencies.
Compared to the low-power, virtualized, equipment
today; the FSA infrastructure is no longer an efficient
host of applications. In addition, the system is no longer
manufactured or supported in the United States. A new
application hosted in a data center system will better support
the producers in the United States and reduce the carbon
footprint generated by the legacy systems and the equipment
operating and maintained in the county offices.
iv Data provided by OCIO
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