Agricultural marketing service specialty crops system modernization

Challenge: USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) Specialty Crops Inspection Division has billing, inspection, and certificate generation and issuance processes that support inspection and certification of over 10.7 billion pounds of processed fruit and vegetable products and 49.9 billion pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables. This includes fruit and vegetables for school lunches and military combat rations. AMS was managed through a combination of inefficient manual, paper-based processes and outdated legacy IT systems.

Approach & Outcomes: With TMF support, USDA moved to a cloud-based solution that uses existing commercial products and offerings. This system enables AMS Specialty Crops inspectors, frontline managers, and others to securely gather and store field evaluation data, interface with business applications, and process customer order and billing information. This investment:

• Ensured that perishable agricultural items move more efficiently through the inspection process, for consumers to receive the freshest commodities possible
• Facilitated a cultural transformation in the Specialty Crops Inspection program, streamlining, standardizing, and modernizing underlying processes

TMF funding accelerated the project into a single effort, reducing project development and implementation time by an estimated two years.

For a deep dive on this investment, read our case study.