Farm Service Agency Administrator Jonathan Coppess kicked off the first public meeting of the Modernize and Innovate the Delivery of Agricultural Systems (MIDAS) project this morning, giving a brief overview of the project that is expected to improve the delivery of programs and benefits to farmers and ranchers.
“This is an incredible undertaking and it is not an easy journey,” said Coppess. “It will take a lot of resources and efforts.”
View broadcast of the morning session
The multiyear project is not about upgrading computer equipment and getting a new networking infrastructure, according to Coppess. “It’s an investment in our county offices and field-structured FSA,” he said. “It’s about modernizing the way we do business.”
Those same ideas were stressed during the first panel discussion that highlighted the finance, information technology and delivery of farm programs services division of the MIDAS project.
Jim Gwinn, FSA chief information officer and panel member, reiterated that the focus of MIDAS is not on the technology. “We don’t want to focus on IT. We want to find ways to up the quality of service and down the amount of work it takes to complete the service.”
Several discussion sessions were held across the country in FSA county and state offices to understand some of the issues employees and producers are facing. Farmers and ranchers lamented over the length of complex applications and the time to process those applications. Employees said there are too many passwords to get into each system separately, which extends the processing time.
Gwinn said he understood that the FSA system was archaic prior to taking on this project. “People were doing extraordinary things to achieve something,” he said. “We have to figure out how to give a technology that works. That’s the goal of this project.”
