00:01Only the hardiest of conference goers would be here on a Friday, right?

00:06And with me lining up or ending up, you're even hardier and have more perseverance than perhaps I.

00:12But it's been a fantastic...fantastic conference.

00:15I was able to attend a good portion on Wednesday and have just gotten wonderful feedback over the last couple of days...

00:21...and I appreciate Jack and the Esri team giving me an opportunity to talk about what the Department of Agriculture is up.

00:28We've had a long and storied history in geospatial and GIS capabilities, delivering very cutting-edge products...

00:35...very timely products to a very wide mission set, so I'm excited to talk to you a little bit today about...

00:41...who the Department of Agriculture is, what we do, some of those products....

00:46...but then really talk about what I think is exciting, and it's been a current and under theme...a theme...

00:51...an undercurrent that we've been talking about.

00:53It's...it's the concept of a national platform that is going to take the great and extraordinary work...

00:58...you all do as practitioners day in and day out and take us to a higher level of productivity...

01:03...improve communication, and improve collaboration.

01:07The Department of Agriculture has a very broad mission set.

01:10I think when people think about agriculture, they obviously jump right to the farmer...

01:14...and the two million farmers of this nation are extraordinarily important to us...

01:18...ensuring an economic and viable food supply for the nation.

01:22We've had a bright spot in the economy over the last year, in FY 2011, 40-billion-dollar trade surplus on agricultural exports...

01:32...which we're very, very proud of and hope to see that grow...

01:35...the opportunity for farmers to sell their products to the largest markets on the face of the earth.

01:41But we also have the Forest Service within the Department of Agriculture, 193 million acres of forest and grasslands...

01:47...in which tens of millions of people re-create every year...

01:51...ensuring that wildline fire practices are as best as they can be to ensure that the property and lives of our citizens...

01:58...are taken of and that we're stewarding those natural resources in the best manner that we can.

02:03Change gears again but still in the conservation practice, there's 2.3 billion acres of private working lands...

02:09...within the United States and the Natural Resources Conservation Service is dedicated to ensuring the stewardship...

02:15...ensuring that our water, our soil, and our capabilities there, and in terms of environmental resources...

02:21...continue to be as robust as they possibly can be.

02:25About 55 million people call rural America home, some of the best places on the face of the earth to live.

02:31We're very focused on thriving, self-sustaining communities in which there's economic opportunity...

02:38...not just on the farm but an off-farm income, and that we've got broadband capabilities out to those important places...

02:45...that we've got the best in telemedicine and distance learning.

02:48Change gears again. We're touching each and every one of you every day.

02:52Look at the lunch you just had.

02:54A safe, secure food supply, again economically viable, abundant, bar none on the earth.

03:00We deliver that day in and day out.

03:02And the science that goes on behind that is another change in gears on the mission set.

03:09We have the best science on the face of the earth, ensuring not just our natural resources and that economic and abundant food supply...

03:18...but, if you've been on the East Coast in the last couple years, we're got little critters called stink bugs...

03:27They are problematic.

03:28The Agricultural Research Service is very focused on ensuring that we don't have those critters living in our house.

03:32...that are invading our gardens and coming in to warm up during the winter.

03:34And even more nefarious are the bedbugs, right?

03:37That's not something you want to come home with or end up in a room with...

03:40...so, the practices are very broad.

03:43I talked about the food on your plate today.

03:45The Food Safety and Inspection Service, extraordinary job in 6,000 slaughterhouses and food processing plants...

03:51...with roughly 7,000 inspectors around the globe.

03:55I didn't hit every mission area. I just wanted to tell you broadly what we do.

03:59We're in almost every county in the US and a hundred countries overseas.

04:02Agriculture does touch Americans every day and hundreds of millions of people overseas.

04:08As I said, we have a very strong tradition in geospatial and GIS.

04:13I'm going to talk to you a little bit about what we've been up to.

04:15I'm not going to hit every mission area, but these are mission-critical products.

04:20You guys are practitioners and purveyors, and I know there's a good contingent from the Department of Agriculture...

04:25...but whether you're in the intelligence community, the Department of Defense, the HS, EPA, DOE...

04:30...Department of Interior, these are extremely important products that may focus on life and limb.

04:38They could just be decision tools.

04:39They could improve science.

04:41But we're very proud of what we do, and we really have a national treasure sitting in the middle of this nation...

04:46...since the late 1930s, we've been overflying the nation and capturing aerial imagery of every state...

04:53...to ensure we understand what's being planted out there, what are the economic opportunities...

04:58...are we safe and secure?

05:00The Aerial Field Photography Office in the Farm Services Agency actually has 11 million images sitting right now in our warehouses.

05:07We're taking that information in every year.

05:09We're providing that out.

05:11Really, a national treasure, and I'm actually going to challenge you all.

05:14We're looking for a creative way to take those 11 million images...

05:17...while for the past few years, we've been doing this in a digitized manner, digital cameras.

05:21We're sitting on this national treasure of 11 million images in which we need to find a creative way to get that digitized...

05:27...and get it out into the public's hands, because think about the temporal change or chronological look...

05:33...at what has been going on in our nation from the 1940s and forward.

05:38It would be extraordinary.

05:41Here are a few of the products.

05:42I'm going to just hit them at a very high level.

05:44That's an example of a temporal change.

05:47You're seeing Redlands, California, in a time phase.

05:50What was broadly rural area and you see some growth there.

05:55The yellow polygons behind that are what we call the common land unit.

05:58It's a base layer that we develop so that we can talk in a common manner to the farmer...

06:03...as to what they're doing within their operations and the programs they sign up.

06:07We use them for insurance. We use it for natural resource conservation.

06:13Extremely important, and you can see the products that we can build upon that.

06:17When a farmer comes into an office and talks to us about what they're planning, they want to be in a program with us...

06:23...they want to take out insurance on that to make sure that their operation is in the best position it possibly can be.

06:30We want to show them that image.

06:31They want to be able to see a landmark, so very high definition, yep, that's my field and that's a shed...

06:36...and that's what I'm planting over here, so if there is a loss...

06:40...we can go back and work with them to get them taken care of as quickly as possible.

06:45Another example, Mount St. Helens, before and after.

06:49What's interesting is that if you look at Google or Bing or a lot of open source imagery out there...

06:54...you'll see a little tag on the bottom says, you know, came from the Department of Agriculture...

06:58...the US Forest Service, the Farm Services Agency.

07:01This chart shows how much imagery we've got in these areas over time.

07:07Going to change gears real quick. Talk about the Natural Resource Conservation Service.

07:11I think I did a good job of stating at a high level what's going on.

07:16But again, very, very strong practices in using geospatial capabilities.

07:20Give you an example of what a technician out in the field is up to.

07:26May jump in their truck in the morning to go out and visit a farmer in a county 50 miles down the road, gets there.

07:31In today's workflow, we'll take GPS readings, we'll work with the farmer.

07:35They may want to put a pond on that land, so they may want to stop a running water flow...

07:38...so that they've got better irrigation practices or they want to water livestock.

07:43They'll come up, take the readings, lidar or something that we're relying heavily on, you need a lot of good elevation data.

07:48They'll jump back in the truck, drive 50 miles back, work for a couple days to a week or so, maybe even two weeks...

07:54...put together maybe three options for that farmer, everything from, here are the designs, here are the blueprints...

08:00...here's how we could do it, here's the bill of materials.

08:02Get back in the truck, drive another 50 miles back and show that to the farmer.

08:04We hope that the farmer likes option one, two, or three; agrees to it; and then we move on.

08:09Well, in many cases that's not the way it goes down, right?

08:12We would like to have tools that are mobile, mobily available so that that technician goes out once...

08:18...gets five options for the farmer within a couple hours, shows the imagery overlaid on their common land unit...

08:24...here's the elevation, lidar data, yep, I agree to that. Here's your bill of materials.

08:28We sign a contract. Or they get a grant.

08:32The farmer's in a better position. The environment's in a better position.

08:35We're that much more productive in what we do, that much more efficient, and that much more effective.

08:42I think the diagram to the left is self-explanatory, but it talks about how we want to talk in more common standards...

08:47...and layer this information so that we can use it once and in multiple cases.

08:56Natural Resource Conservation Service has been leading, extremely strong in what they do...

09:00...just like Farm Services Agency is strong in what they do.

09:03They've built a basically one-stop shop with standardized definitions for NRCS employees.

09:10This talks a little bit about that, a true asset for the nation.

09:14I'm going to switch gears real quick, though, and talk about the Forest Service.

09:17Forest Service, I think everybody gets it, right? Wildland fire.

09:20It's something that really resonates.

09:22The remote sensing data the department pulls down through the Forest Service is extraordinary, up to 36 sensors from Landsat...

09:30...and MODIS satellite capabilities, turning those into real-time products, so at an incident basecamp when a fire team shows up...

09:38...and, oh, by the way, they may come from a local entity, they may come from DOI, another agency...

09:43...they may come from the Forest Service.

09:45We put these fire teams together, then we try to get them extraordinarily good information so they can go out and fight that fire.

09:52Near real-time data is extraordinarily important so that team on the ground has situational awareness, who's on their flanks...

09:58...what's the burn pattern, what's the weather that's going on.

10:01These products that Forest Service puts out are mission critical, just like the first two that I said, extraordinarily mission critical.

10:08And we have an issue, we can't get in each other's way as we're doing this.

10:11The snag is a big department.

10:12I think I laid that out well for you, a very broad mission set.

10:15But I believe that together, we can do even greater things.

10:20And we've begun that.

10:21The cloud, well, there's a lot of hyperbole in our business.

10:25We get excited about SOA. We get excited about the cloud.

10:28And now it's big data.

10:30These things are very synergistic.

10:32The evolution and service-oriented architecture has allowed us to better leverage cloud computing capabilities.

10:39That's a reality today.

10:40So where I showed you three cases of the Department of Agriculture...

10:44...very different mission sets doing very mission-critical things that are important to their business line...

10:48...they're all doing it on their own.

10:51Here's an example, and I'm going to go to a second example, but I'm going to hit one that we did almost a year, year and a half ago...

10:57...it was on the national-level exercise.

11:00Because of cloud technologies, we could allow the existing legacy infrastructures and the business products...

11:05...that come out of that that are mission critical to go along, but for the first time in history...

11:09...we were able to take every mission area, seven mission areas, and more than 19 different business lines under that...

11:17...and take disparate data and present it in a common operating picture so that when we went through the national-level exercise...

11:23...for continuity of operations, we could the secretary, we could tell the undersecretary, we could tell the business lead...

11:30...here's what we've got going on.

11:31We've got a hurricane occurring in this part of the country.

11:34We need to do emergency housing.

11:36RD mission area has a role in that.

11:39We had a blow down in a recreation area that was national Forest Service land.

11:43We need to evacuate citizens. We've got real-time information on that.

11:47Perhaps there was livestock damaged, and those livestock deteriorating can cause an environmental issue...

11:54...so the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service has a need to clean those carcasses up and move them out.

11:59It is extraordinarily powerful when we work together to achieve a common operating picture.

12:04And some agencies do it better than others.

12:07But as a whole in the federal government, we're not winning.

12:11This is an example of another product that came out of the cloud, and we did it in basically 30 days...

12:17...and it was taking very disparate mission information and presenting a picture on deputy secretary Merrigan's initiative for...

12:25...know your farmer, know your food, which is about thriving, sustainable, local food systems...

12:31...for small and mid-sized business, making sure we've got economic opportunity, nutritious capabilities...

12:36...and we're doing it in an environmentally sound way, extraordinarily important.

12:40What we were able to do is take, where's the local farmer's market where a farmer can sell his or her goods?

12:47Where can we grow vegetables longer in the growing season by putting hoop houses or tunnels up?

12:54Where is the closest extension service so that people can get information on how to do that?

12:59In the past, we would have developed four or five products and we would have tried to marry them up.

13:04It would have taken a long time.

13:05Today, we're doing this in days.

13:08[Audience cheer]

13:10Is Kathleen back there?

13:13Another example, and there's a point why I'm hitting these a little more detailed, energy.

13:20Now energy is something from a geopolitical standpoint and economic standpoint and many other factors...

13:27...that we have a great amount of untapped resources out there, a great opportunity in biomass.

13:36So, you know, in the agriculture industry, it's about food and fiber and feed.

13:41We'd like to see it about energy and chemicals that we can derive from the oils, biopreferred products.

13:50And the reality is, if we look at this just from the farmer's perspective who could grow some biomass...

13:54...we may miss the point that there are some lands that are being underutilized that could be put into a different stream...

14:01...and could provide us biomass.

14:03But the issue is, where would we refine those products?

14:05Have we placed a biodiesel facility in the right place?

14:08Have we put the ethanol plant in the right place so we draw and everybody's boat is floated at the same time.

14:13And, oh, by the way, you need a demand. Is there a biodiesel demand? Where does our navy sit in relation to these things?

14:20Can we move over to diodiesel for our fleet? Can we do that for aircraft?

14:24So in a very quick time frame and iterating new products and new functionality...

14:30...we took that broad, disparate set of characteristics and in our energy map which you can see on our home page...

14:36...or just type in "USDA energy maps," you will see that we've got this capability, and we delivered it very quickly...

14:43...and, oh, by the way, we want to put this in the farmer's and the rancher's hand...

14:47...or into the business's hand that want to put a refinery somewhere.

14:50Let them run the economic numbers, get the technical support, and say, yes, we're going to go do this for the nation...

14:56...and we're going to move forward.

14:59So, I talked a little bit about the great work we do, and I'm going to tell you, you can extrapolate this across the federal government.

15:08You can put it into the local government. You can put it into the state. You can put it in the commercial sector.

15:12This is a diagram, and I blame Michael Locatis from Department of Energy or Malcolm Jackson for...if I get this wrong.

15:20But they have been my partners in moving forward on this.

15:23I don't know their infrastructure. I may have it slightly wrong.

15:27But I can tell if you...I have it directionally correct.

15:29If you look at the bottom of the stack, that's generally where we are today.

15:34Some agencies within a department have legacy infrastructure.

15:37They may be on a server-based platform.

15:39But they may be in a stand-alone environment with just a desktop running their geospatial and GIS products.

15:47The power of that is minimized because you can't share information readily.

15:52You're doing your own thing.

15:53You're not leveraging compute power. You're not leveraging the network.

15:58We all have that, and I'm not saying that's going to go away immediately.

16:01It's probably going to need to coexist like a number of the things I'm going to say here.

16:04But just take USDA.

16:05I've got at least five different environments running right now.

16:08They're all on different virgins...versions, excuse me.

16:11They are not necessarily patched well, scanned well, and that information is stovepipe.

16:18I call them "stovepipes of excellence," but it's critically important to the mission.

16:21They do great work. It's important.

16:24We can't get in each other's way as we do this.

16:26But if you think about that, and I'm doing that if Michael Locatis is doing that over at the Department of Energy...

16:31...and if Malcolm Jackson at EPA is doing that, and if Bernie Mazer is doing that over at the Department of Interior...

16:37...and I just named four CIOs, and I don't have it exactly right, but I guarantee that's what's happening.

16:41It's not cost-effective. It's not secure. It's not overly productive. And it sure isn't information sharing.

16:48So what we've got going on is, the cloud has come.

16:51It is here today.

16:52And I believe that in the middle, you're going to see organizations build their own clouds.

16:57We've done it. We're three years in.

16:59Our OPEX is down 60 percent, so what cost a server to host a...

17:04...an Esri software package on a server was about $18,000 benchmark...

17:10...that's competitive commercial rate two years ago.

17:13In the cloud, sharing infrastructure, we can do that for $6,000 a year, and we've gone down to $5,000 this year.

17:18So you'll see us, and we're doing that for a lot of products, right?

17:20Anything that we bring in, that we put up as we're consolidating data centers, we want to put that in and share that compute.

17:27And that's great, and that's going to happen.

17:29But the question I'll ask, Is USDA going to be as far ahead as DOE is?

17:35Locatis is much smarter than me, and he's always out in front, right?

17:38Energy may be iterating more quickly, may get to a newer version.

17:43So the top picture is probably the most controversial, but where I think we need to be, it's a reality today.

17:48We're doing business there.

17:50And the reality is that together we can do extraordinary things, and we can move together.

17:56So we moved 120,000 people and 130,000 e-mail boxes in four months into a commercial public cloud with Dell and Microsoft.

18:06The reality is, I have to move with that wave when it goes.

18:09The days of saying, "I'm unique and my 120,000 people are unique," and then the Forest Service turns around and say...

18:14..."My 40,000 people are unique."

18:15Yes, we are unique. We do different things.

18:17But together for unified communications, collaboration, and productivity...

18:21...we decided we could go with 3.2 million commercial customers.

18:25And let me tell you, it's cheap. And let me tell you, it's better functionality.

18:28So this picture here for geospatial is, in my mind, the national platform.

18:34I'm doing business out in it right now.

18:35EPA is doing business, and the DOE's doing it.

18:38Why aren't we sharing our information? Why aren't we doing it in the multitenant way?

18:41That's my challenge to you all.

18:43You have learned so much over the last couple days and brought your expertise to bear.

18:47We as a nation have an opportunity to share information there.

18:51Yeah, some of it need to be protected.

18:52That's the boxes that show that USDA has stuff that maybe EPA shouldn't be seeing.

18:56There's laws.

18:58But why can't expose anything else which I think is the preponderance of what we do.

19:01Why can't DOI do that? Why can't the state be in there doing it? And local?

19:06I'll tell you what, we are under diminished resources.

19:09The constraints are real to the nation.

19:12This is cheap, it's fast, and it's awesome.

19:16And you know what? People feel better in there and they say you only get one or two of those constraints.

19:20You can't have all three, and that was true five years ago.

19:22This is a reality.

19:24We're doing it. We're iterating product.

19:25We have people knocking on our doors. We've got a coalition of people that are very interested in doing this.

19:30I think we're on the cusp of ideation and creativity that we have not been before.

19:35And sometimes we're not as optimistic in this nation, certainly over the last few years...

19:39...I think some of the stalemate we're going through.

19:42But we have more in common than anybody else on the face of the earth.

19:46This is it.

19:47This is an opportunity. You guys are the purveyors.

19:49Daniel Burnham, who was the architect of the White City in the Columbian Exposition in 1893...

19:53...kind of seen as the father of modern urban planning, you know, built a city and in a number of months...

20:00...it was...it was the biggest hit on the face of the earth in 1893.

20:02They used power and electricity and irrigation in ways that hadn't been used in cities.

20:09It was the showcase, and he's got one of the best quotes I've ever heard, and that is...

20:14..."Make no small plans, for they fail to stir man's blood and they in themselves will never be realized."

20:21That's my challenge to you all.

20:22You're great at what you do.

20:23You do extraordinary things together.

20:25Over the next number of months and year or two, there may be some coexistence in what I'm talking about here.

20:31The legacy may need to continue for a period of time.

20:35We will build private clouds, but there's a public cloud there right now.

20:39Done smartly, we can do it more efficiently, more effectively, and in the best manner that I think this nation deserves.

20:46So I thank you. Those are my remarks today, and, Jack, thank you, again, for having me up.