The FSA, part of the USDA, administers and manages farm commodity, credit, conservation, disaster and loan programs for millions of farmers through a network of 2,350 county offices across the U.S.

The farmers apply for payments under those programs at the county offices and the requests are processed in a Kansas City, Mo., data center that houses the aging IBM AS/400 computers that run Cobol-based payment applications.

The FSA payment system began to seriously malfunction late last year, and while it was stabilized in late January, a major upgrade will be needed soon, acknowledged a USDA spokesman this week.

Thus Johanns last week ordered administrators to create a plan to replace the AS/400-based system with a Web-based one that can handle a rapidly growing workload, the spokesman said. Johanns ordered that a report on the plan be delivered to him during the week of March 19.

The spokesman said that the response time of the AS/400 systems slowed significantly in November, causing timeouts that ended transactions before they were completed. By mid-January, he said, the system had virtually shut down. "It was operational, but not very responsive," said the spokesman. "It was distressing to us and to our customers [the farmers]."