'This Is Absolutely Unacceptable': Joni Ernst Demands End To Manual Data Entry At USDA

5 months ago

During a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing in July, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) asked nominee for Under Secretary of Agriculture for Farm Production and Conservation Richard Fordyce about manual data entry for some parts of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's website.

Transcript

00:00forward to working with you. Senator Ernst. Thank you, Chairman Bozeman, and to our witness today,

00:06Mr. Fordyce. Congratulations on your nomination to you and your family. Welcome to the committee.

00:13I appreciate your testimony and your willingness to fill such an important role within our

00:18administration. And I'm also going to start by saying that you have quite a team waiting for you

00:25when you get to USDA, including a fellow Iowan, Pat Swanson, who is the administrator of the Risk

00:32Management Agency, as well as one of my former staffers as well, Matthew, who's now serving at

00:39FPAC. So alongside these great folks and with your extensive ag background as well, I have no doubt

00:47you're going to be able to hit the ground running, and I'm really excited about it. So Mr. Fordyce,

00:52that phrase I've heard you use, one farmer, one form. Okay, I really like that. I know it resonates

01:01with my producers back in Iowa as well. A lot of our farmers are still juggling multiple forms across

01:09various agencies, and the process is very time-consuming and redundant. While some producers

01:16prefer walking into their local FSA offices with physical yield maps, others are ready for a digital

01:24option, and we need a system that will work for both those that prefer to put their hands on a map

01:32and those that would like to do it digitally. That same modernization is desperately needed when it

01:38comes to how USDA tracks and monitors foreign land ownership in the United States. The Agriculture

01:45Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, AFIDA, was signed into law in 1978 and has been barely touched since

01:54then. And even today, foreign land purchases are reported on paper, and staff must manually re-enter

02:02each submission, a process that's inefficient and prone to errors, and I have seen this firsthand.

02:09Last year, USDA's reaction to my oversight letter with Senator Fetterman was to add a disclaimer on

02:17their website saying, typographical errors may occur because of the manual nature of data entry,

02:25and I am saying, Mr. Fordyce, that this is absolutely unacceptable, and I'm glad that the Trump

02:31administration agrees with me. The recent commitments from Secretary Rollins to modernize the AFIDA

02:37reporting process is welcome news. It's a much-needed step to protect American farmland from our foreign

02:43adversaries. In the upcoming Farm Bill, I'm hopeful we build on that momentum with my Farmland Act to

02:50make clear our food supply is not for sale, at least not to our adversaries. So, Mr. Fordyce, if confirmed,

02:59will you commit to making USDA's digital modernization, both for farmers and programs like AFIDA,

03:06a top priority? Yes, Senator. Appreciate your comments and certainly your questions,

03:15but first of all, let me say that Pat Swanson is fantastic. She's the best. Yeah, she is great.

03:21I've known her a number of years. So, you know, the one farm or one form was just, I guess,

03:30me thinking about like what could be something that was short and maybe got to the point. And I would say

03:38that we, so we started to work on that a little bit in the first Trump administration, didn't quite

03:46get it to the finish line from a modernizing acreage reporting standpoint. And we've talked quite a bit

03:53during the hearing about technology and precision agriculture and those type things. And, you know,

04:00we don't know the number of farmers that employ precision agriculture on their farms, but depending

04:05on where you are located in the country, you know, that number can, that number, that percentage number

04:10can be pretty high. And those farmers right now are sharing that data with their seed supplier,

04:15their fertilizer company, their crop, their crop insurance company, if the, if that crop insurance

04:22company has the ability to accept it. And I think it makes a lot of sense to be able to

04:29get, you get the three agencies and two, two, maybe more than NRCS, but to get them in a position to be

04:36able to accept that data. And, you know, my hope would be is that as a farmer is planting his or her crop,

04:42that they are actually populating a, an acreage report as they're progressing through, uh, planting

04:48season. I mean, that would be, that would be fantastic. And that certainly will be priority one

04:54from a technology modernization standpoint and a FIDA as well. I, I was director of the Missouri

05:00Department of Agriculture. I was responsible for that reporting at the state level and then as

05:06the FSA administrator. And there is certainly probably some better, uh, better technologies to

05:12be able to capture that information. Absolutely. Well, thank you, Mr. Fordyce. And I do have some

05:16questions I'll submit for the record regarding 45 Z as well. So thank you very much. I appreciate it.

05:22Thank you, chair. Thank you.

'This Is Absolutely Unacceptable': Joni Ernst Demands End To Manual Data Entry At USDA

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