By Steve Stark
Steve Stark
MIDAS Business Process Owner
Farm Service Agency
As the MIDAS team is gearing up for the next release — Business Partner — I wanted to provide an update on our first release —Farm Records. After an official release goes into production, the system goes into a period called Operations and Maintenance (O&M). Any system fixes or modifications that come following the initial production release are called “O&M releases.” Since Farm Records was Release 1, the O&M Farm Records releases are called Release 1.1, 1.2, 1.3… and so on. Business Partner will be Release 2.
The Farm Records team has been working hard to issue system fixes and updates over the past 17 months since the official Farm Records release.
The most recent releases included:
Release 1.6:
- Multiple revisions to the tract division wizard to remove numerous bugs that have been discovered in the tool and make the default method of tract division divide base acres according the percent of “Effective DCP Cropland.” These revisions eliminated the need to use the landowner designation method to manually distribute bases when conservation program acres such as CRP are present on the tract.
- New attributes were added to parent and child farms involved in recons and parent and child tracts involved in recons. These attributes are replicated to FRS as well. The addition of these attributes and their replication to FRS improves the ability to track recon activities.
Release 1.7:
- A pop-up advising a user working on the GIS side of the farm record that the CRM side of the farm record will time out soon has been added. This allows the user to extend the CRM session to avoid the CRM timeout and keep the record active until extensive or complicated edits in GIS can be completed.
- Additionally, a new method for overlap checking was implemented that drastically reduced the number of polygons involved in the overlap check. This allows edits to be processed on extremely large farms and farms with tracts that contain a large number of polygons.
Additional releases containing fixes for defects and enhancements within MIDAS Farm Records will be delayed until after the Business Partner release is implemented.
Many of our system fixes or modifications come from the field’s direct feedback. Please keep submitting incident reports and posting on the USDA Connect Training and Support forum to let us know how the system is working.
