The RFI is amended to correct the day that responses are due from Wednesday to Thursday and to post the questions and answers. Geospatially Enabled Acreage Reporting System INTRODUCTION This Request for Information (RFI)/Source Sought is being issued solely for information and planning purposes and does not constitute an Invitation for Bids (IFB), a Request for Proposals (RFP), a Request for Quotations (RFQ) or an indication that the Government will contract for any of the items and/or services contained in this notice. In accordance with FAR 52.215-3, Request for Information or Solicitation for Planning Purposes, the Government will not pay for any information/items submitted in response to the RFI. No determination as to the viability of this requirement has been made at this point and there is currently no solicitation for this effort. Any solicitation resulting from this RFI will be announced separately. BACKGROUND United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farm Production and Conservation (FPAC) is issuing this request for information as part of a market research and information gathering effort to determine the availability of existing technologies and innovative solutions to support the acreage reporting requirements for USDA programs. The government is requesting information on geospatially enabled commercial acreage reporting technologies, whether they leverage commercial off the shelf (COTS), Government off the Shelf (GOTS), and/or custom-developed solutions. This request for information is open to all interested parties . However, FPAC is requesting information on solutions that have been implemented and or new innovative approaches to meeting the acreage reporting requirements for producer acreage reporting. FPAC is not particularly interested in receiving capability statements and marketing material from the system development vendors. The primary NAICS code for this requirement is 511210– Software Publishers with a size standard of $41.5M. Other NAICS codes for this requirement include: 541511 Custom Computer Programming Services – Size Standard - $30.0M 423430 Computer and Computer Peripheral Equipment and Software Merchant Wholesalers - Size Standard - 250 employees 541519 Other Computer Related Services – Size Standard - $30.0M 518210 Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services Size Standard - $35.0M FPAC is the Department’s focal point for the nation’s farmers and ranchers and other stewards of private agricultural lands and non-industrial private forest lands. FPAC agencies implement programs designed to mitigate the significant risks of farming through crop insurance services, conservation programs and technical assistance, and commodity, lending, and disaster programs. Many of our programs require detailed acreage reporting including program-specific data, such as type of crop planted, date planted, insurance status, conservation data, and other characteristics. Common Land Units (CLUs) are used to identify specific plots of land and gather data. CLUs may vary among programs – for example, the CLU’s for crop reporting may not be the same used for Risk management. STATEMENT OF OBJECTIVES Filing a timely crop acreage report is the foundation for all FSA programs and is used to create and maintain eligibility for USDA conservation, disaster assistance, safety net, crop insurance, and farm loan programs. A crop acreage report documents all crops and intended uses, including the acres and location. It is an important part of record-keeping for our customers. USDA estimates that about 5 million hours per year are spent on acreage reporting by producers and USDA staff. Given the importance of acreage reporting to USDA and the U.S. agricultural industry, FSA is seeking ready-made off-the-shelf software to be used by employees to create, collect, edit, and save crop acreage related information, along with a geospatial representation (acres and location) of the planting boundaries. FSA wishes to evaluate options to ensure that the selected information technology platforms and services will adequately meet USDA and customer requirements for a scalable long-term solution with sufficient capacity to meet the demand at peak acreage reporting seasons. Geospatially Enabled Acreage Reporting Overall, the goal of the acreage reporting modernization effort is to build a geospatially enhanced acreage reporting services that will support the OneUSDA framework for producer crop acreage reporting. This goal can be achieved through the following objectives: Employee Internal Objectives providing geospatial and tabular acreage reporting capabilities maintaining editable historical geospatial acreage reports sharing and integrating geospatial acreage report data with agency business programs systems and partner agencies Customer Public Facing Objectives allowing producers to view historical reports, including the geospatial representations, from their home computer or tablet allowing producers to submit geospatially enabled acreage reports to FSA directly from their home computer, tablet, or mobile device (including e-signing) accepting precision ag information to be used when reporting acreage accepting acreage reports from third-party service providers on behalf of producers. Currently FSA collects the geospatial component of the customers acreage report using a hard-copy map that the producer and employee mark-up with annual crop acreage information, including acres and approximately location. The tabular information collected on the map is then manually entered into the current reporting application (CARS – Crop Acreage Reporting System). FSA seeks to modernize the current acreage reporting workflow for employees by reducing the reliance on the manual hard-copy map process and incorporating the collection and documentation of crop planting boundary (acres and location) into a geospatially enabled crop acreage report. For example, the solution should allow the users to create (i.e. draw) geospatial planting boundaries by editing geographic base layers but utilizing split, merge, import and unionization functionality. The solution should allow for collection of tabular acreage reporting information associated with the planting boundaries, such as crop, type, intended use, planting date, planting status, etc. Details regarding tabular data collection can be found in handbook 2-CP, Acreage and Compliance Determinations. The solution must be able to create a printable map that includes farm number, tract number, field/subfield number, crop, intended use, number of acres, boundaries of the crop, planting pattern, planting date, producer/shares, and irrigation practice. In addition, the solution should include the ability to allow producers to submit geospatially enabled crop acreage reports electronically. In the future, enhancements must allow for use of precision agriculture planting boundaries in the reporting process, by merging and/or unionizing with the base AR layer. System responsiveness and scalability during peak activity seasons is essential, and if a system is not designed correctly, it will have significant negative impacts on staff productivity. During the 2021 crop reporting season, FSA collected approximately 2.7 million farm crop acreage reports from producers, with more than 19.5 million fields reported. Approximately 25 percent of fields reported are subfields and require delineation to create planting boundaries. Because the annual deadlines for crop acreage reporting are primarily in the summer, County office staff need a high-performing solution with efficient functionality to handle the peak reporting periods. In additional producers and USDA customers need a user-friendly solution that with sufficient performance capacity and reliability to support producer reporting from home. For example, the solution must be able to meet the following performance metrics. Peak farm crop reports collected for 2021 were 105k per day with 450k fields reported Concurrent users during peak reporting season are 6000 During peak acreage reporting season, the system must be able to handle: 1 million transactions per minute with a 1ms response time average of 3.5 million database transactions per 12-hour period with a 2ms average database response time with no more than 5 errors captured. 1.5 million database transactions in 4-hour period with 2ms average database response time In addition, FSA is concerned about the network demands that geospatial mapping capabilities and imagery with have on the USDA network and for producers at home. FPAC is interested in technology that is flexible and configurable enough to support the ability to have program-specific CLUs with program-specific attributes. The desire is for the system to allow additional attributes and associated business rules added to support future Farm Bills without software development. FPAC is interested in all technologies, whether they are commercial off the shelf (COTS), Government off the Shelf (GOTS), or custom-developed solutions. Please note, any development performed at government expense to meet this requirement will be considered work for hire with full intellectual property rights to the Federal government. USDA is seeking solutions that are cost effective, interoperable, secure (In accordance with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA)), reliable, robust, and scalable. USDA also requires a licensing model that enables the flexibility to support our mission area with predictable, fixed licensing costs. Of interest is an Enterprise-Wide licensing agreement as opposed to named user, concurrent user, or per-unit licensing. More specific requirements are attached in the “Acreage Reporting Requirements Matrix” along with other referenced documentation. RESPONSE The government requests interested parties respond to this RFI with a maximum 10 pages that answer the following questions. Vendors are not required to have answers for every question, however it is required that N/A be entered for unanswered questions. It is recommended that vendors provide as much information as possible to identify existing solutions or technologies that can be leveraged for this specific requirement. The government is most interested in Part 1 of the questions “Software Solutions or Modules.” Secondarily, if a solution is available, information regarding the subsequent topics is requested. The government is a less interested in broad marketing material or vendor capability statements. Software Solutions or Modules Does your firm have a solution(s) that supports the geospatially enabled acreage reporting requirements as described above? If so, please complete Appendix A (Requirements Matrix). This matrix has the following format and instructions (The matrix does not count against the 10-page submission limitation: Appendix A Format and Instructions Column Description Number The requirement number – do not change Requirement Text The text of the requirement – do not change In Production Please place a 1 in this column if the functionality exits and is operating in a Federal customer production environment. Please specify the customer in the Notes column. In Development Please place a 1 in this column if is currently in development. Please specify the planned Federal customer release date for the functionality in the Notes column. Planned for Future Release Please place a 1 in this column if the functionality is planned for a future release. Please specify the planned Federal customer release date for the functionality in the Notes column. Not Planned Please place a 1 in this column if the functionality is not planned for a future release. Notes Please complete as outlined above. Based on the information provided, please explain the software solutions, products, modules, or peripheral devices, that you think may support this requirement? For relevant potential products, please provide descriptions (e.g., lists and definitions) of the functional and technical features. How much customization or configuration of your product(s), do you anticipate needing to meet these requirements? Please differentiate between customization and configuration. If ESRI Tool set is used, which version of ESRI is being used? If the geospatial toolset is not ESRI based, please provide details regarding the toolset being recommended. Experience Providing the Solution(s) in the Marketplace Have the proposed solutions been implemented in other government agencies? Please describe the overall market use for your solution specific to this requirement – including which Federal agencies it is operating in production to support the agency’s mission. Please provide examples, references, and points of contact for relevant implementations, with a focus on the Federal Government or agriculture industry. If the solution leverages industry ERP, CRM or other low-code development platforms, the government is only interested in customer references if the solution has been implemented to support a very similar functional requirement. If your solution is not operating in a Federal Agency, please describe the plans to federalize your product to be compliant FISMA, Section 508, and other Federal IT standards. Licensing & Agreements FPAC desires to limit licensing fees, however, if a licensing model is required for your solution, please describe the enterprise licensing options. Does the acquisition of your solution require the Government to acquire services beyond product experts to train our users? Delivery and Implementation Options Please provide information on how the solution is delivered (on-premise, hybrid, cloud, managed service, etc.). Please describe the recommended deployment model for your solution to support a nation- wide user base of end user customers and State and County offices. Please describe your overall solution release schedule, including patch releases to address software issues and emerging federal requirements. Please describe the structure of the team that implemented your solution. Please provide the government with any thoughts on approach to the solution, including technology, methodology, or implementation strategy. Demonstrations and Proof of Concept Please describe your approach to a short-term, low-cost proof of concept that allows the government to ensure product viability prior to incurring licensing or services costs. The government is contemplating an operations capability demonstration as part of the acquisition process, how long would you anticipate requiring to prepare for a demonstration? Additional Information Please include discussion of any topic that you would feel of value for the government to consider regarding this requirement. Please provide any new innovative approaches or emerging technologies that your firm may have on meeting the producer acreage reporting requirements. REFERENCES The following documents are included in this RFI as reference material for industry: Common Acreage Reporting Transmission Schema Geospatial Acreage Reporting Transmission Schema Acreage and Compliance Determinations Farm, Tract, and Crop Data Descriptions FSA Handbook on Geospatial Data Systems These are provided to inform responders regarding our Acreage Reporting processes, but require no response. POINT of CONTACT: Nancy Harris Contract Specialist
[email protected] TIMELINES FOR QUESTIONS and ANSWERS: Questions regarding this RFI must be submitted no later than 12:00 pm CT, Friday, February 25, 2022 to
[email protected] . Posting of Questions and Answers: An amendment that provides the questions and answers will be posted no later than March 2, 2022 . SUBMISSION of RESPONSES Responses shall be submitted to Nancy Harris by 12:00 pm CT, Thursday, March 10, 2022. The subject line must contain “GEAR RFI Response”. Responses must include the following information: Responses to questions Completed Appendix A – Acreage Reporting Requirements Matrix, if applicable. All responses must include the following information: Company name; Company address; Company business size; Unique Entity Identifier Current North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Codes; and Point-of-contact name, telephone number, and email address.