American farms have a new steward for their safety net, disaster programs... Palantir
Wins $300M deal over Salesforce, IBM because of 'integration with existing USDA systems,' among other things
Palantir has won a $300 million contract from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to support the National Farm Security Action Plan (NFSAP) and modernize how USDA delivers services to America's farmers.
The agreement aims to boost farm security and support USDA’s Farm Production and Conservation (FPAC), which facilitates crop insurance, conservation programs, farm safety net programs, lending, and disaster programs.
Palantir has pledged to provide operational software to enable the USDA to boost supply chain resilience and protect programs from fraud, abuse, and "foreign adversary influence." The government department is to gain critical visibility into risks that can affect America’s agricultural production and food supply, the US spy-tech company said in a statement.
REG AD
The deal also supports the USDA's One Farmer, One File initiative, which aims to cut the red tape and offer "digital-first tools."
REG AD
Palantir is backing the USDA's Landmark platform too, which provided $11 billion in assistance in February. The platform is consolidating fragmented legacy systems, reducing maintenance costs, strengthening data security, and enabling enabling faster responses as new programs and priorities emerge, the USDA claimed.
USDA Chief Information Officer Sam Berry said: "Our farmers sustain this nation, and modern tools help us support them with greater precision. I look forward to working with Palantir as we continue serving the American farming community, which serves all of us every single day."
Other Palantir projects with the USDA include helping figure out where its staff should sit. A contract notice said the organizations return-to-work mandate meant it needed "advanced data integration capabilities to consolidate information from multiple sources, real-time analytics to optimize space utilization and employee seat assignments, and robust security compliance to protect sensitive organizational data."
Only Palantir is up to the job, the USDA claimed. "While there are several companies that provide data analytics and integration platforms, Databricks, Snowflake, IBM, SAS, Salesforce, and Alteryx, none offer the combination of capabilities, enterprise scale data fusion, real-time analytics, compliance monitoring and integration with existing USDA systems that Palantir provides," USDA chief data and artificial intelligence officer Christopher Alvares told The Register. ®