USDA Sources Sought: Visualization for National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS)

Notice ID: REQ1121530SS

National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) produces agriculture statistics that are used by industry and educators across the Nation. NASS conducts hundreds of surveys and the Census of Agriculture and prepares reports covering virtually every facet of U.S. agriculture — production and supplies of food and fiber, prices paid and received by farmers, farm labor and wages.  In addition, NASS’ various Field Offices (FO’s) publish data about many of the same topics for local audiences.  NASS publications cover a wide range of subjects, from traditional crops, such as corn and wheat, to specialties, such as mushrooms and flowers; from calves born, to hogs slaughtered; from agricultural prices to land in farms. This contract will provide expert geoinformatics personnel that will work with NASS to maintain the use of interactive statistical graphics on our external website to help to improve the interpretability and applicability of the data we produce.

The product is a cloud hosting application for NASS data. The contractor shall provide the following:

• Ensuring that the USDA Reports application server and companion infrastructure are running and up to date.
• Manage users and roles in USDA Reports admin section.
• Upgrading and applying security fixes to the underlying application frameworks.

PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS:

• The backend uses Ruby-on-Rails hosted on an Ubuntu server, connected to a Postgres database. (hosted on Amazon AWS) This is used to persist administration settings and communicate with the NASS QuickStats API. The safety training is an annual requirement for all USDA-ARS employees.
• The frontend is an Angular-based web application hosted on a static-pages web server. • The only existing data is user login information needed to administer the site. All the statistics information used to power the visualizations is hosted on the NASS QuickStats system.
• All data transferred between the frontend, backend and QuickStats is through JSON.
• Backend and database servers are hosted on Amazon AWS (Penguin Labs’s own server). QuickStats data is hosted by USDA NASS.

The Period of Performance includes a Base Year – 05/01/2024 through 04/30/2025 with four option years.

Read more here.

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