Digitizing Request and Activity

Overview

Background 

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is a voluntary, federally funded program administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

It pays agricultural producers to remove environmentally sensitive or highly erodible cropland from agricultural production and replace it with resource-conserving plant life.

—> In order to hay and graze on contracted lands, producers need to submit a request to their county office.

Making sense from current process

Example of paper forms (Exhibit 48, Exhibit 52, CRP-117, CRP-118 ) - producers need to fill out in order to request haying or grazing activity

—- User pain points

—- Generalized flowchart

Initial goals

Who starts the request, the producer or the county staff?

The goal was to cut the paper trail for haying and grazing requests. The obvious win was letting producers start a request on their own and skip the trip to the county office. But the requests involve field activity that staff have to confirm.

Assumptions

I designed and tested two versions. In one, the producer starts the request alone and waits for staff review. In the other, the producer and staff fill it out together, and staff review. I interviewed staff at four county offices and state and federal staff. They told us that when staff need more information from a producer, the producer-first flow turns into back-and-forth, so the process would take even longer.

Selected: shared flow, staff review

Unselected: producer-first, staff review later

Key findings through interviews

The call: We went with the shared flow. It meant the design couldn’t save producers a trip to the office, which was the benefit I’d hoped for. But field activity knowledge was confirmed at the source, and the data was accurate enough to aggregate and verify acreage, which was the larger problem the program had.

Updates on priorities

— Goals

— User flow

Prototype & delivery

Outcome

The new flow digitized four paper forms (Exhibit 48, Exhibit 52, CRP-117, and CRP-118) used to request and report haying and grazing on CRP land. On paper, the location of that activity was hard to record consistently and impossible to aggregate over time, so national headquarters had no visibility into where it was happening and no way to verify acreage at an aggregate level. Recording requests on a map captures location as structured data at the source, which makes long-term, cross-office reporting and acreage verification possible. The design was piloted in six county offices.