The Farm Service Agency was seeking more efficiency even before the current reduction in staff. To that end, USDA accepts electronic acreage reports for FSA programs and crop insurance. MyAgData CEO Michelle Tressel says her company has taken a labor-intensive, paper-based system and digitized it. “Typically, it takes a grower between 12 and 24 hours to file their report in the current manner and that depends on how many counties they farm in as well as the complexity of their farming operation,” said Tressel. “We changed that down to less than an hour.” Regarding simplicity, TurboTax was used as a comparison. There is an option to connect into precision agriculture tools like Climate FieldView. That allows the farmer to submit actual planted reports to FSA and RMA. By using actual planted data, farmers typically save three-to-ten percent on their crop insurance. “If you think about your yields per acre, when you’re using your actual planted acreage, you are no longer diluting your APH by using that larger CLU; correspondingly, you’re increasing your APH and by using your actual planted (acreage), you decrease your crop insurance premium, you increase your yield per acre, which corresponds to a higher guarantee on your crop insurance.” MyAgData is based in Fargo and is the only third-party company with the credentials to submit these reports directly to USDA. Listen to the interview with Tressel.
