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]."
The USDA updated the existing system between Jan. 20 and Jan. 24, increasing the network's bandwidth and security capabilities, adding channel capacity to its servers and new hardware and software to improve firewall performance and increase data throughput. The USDA also re-aligned and re-indexed the databases that support the payment application, which further improved transaction response times.
The spokesman said the agency expects eventually to is replace the AS/400 and Cobol-based payment applications with a completely Web-based system. "The AS/400 systems are so obsolete we can't even buy new parts for them and we have maxed out the available data storage space on them," the spokesman said.
He declined to estimate the cost of replacing the system, or to provide a schedule for completing the work.