The USDA organic seal is found on organic products in stores across the United States.
That seal marks foods and products created using a unique form of agricultural production.
The National Organic Program, part of the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, oversees
the growing organic industry, made up of more than 31,000 certified organic operations located
in 100 countries, with U.S. sales that are topping $43 billion a year.
I’m Jenny Tucker, with the National Organic Program
I’m Kristin Tensuan, with the Information Technology Service
I’m Stacy Swartwood, with the National Organic Program
And I’m Swathy Mudhagouni, with Harmonia Holdings
And we are here to tell you about the Organic Integrity Database, called INTEGRITY.
Organic certification is a public-private partnership.
The USDA oversees 80 independent organizations that directly certify organic farms and businesses
around the world.
Certifiers include small non-profits, to State government agencies, to small businesses,
to large multi-nationals.
Before we built INTEGRITY, these certifiers sent individual spreadsheets with their lists
of organic farms and businesses to the USDA once a year.
The USDA then manually compiled a master list and posted it on a website.
The data quality was poor, given vast differences in systems used to generate the data.
Also, the list was posted online each spring, but was soon out-of-date as farms and businesses
gained or dropped their certification.
Stakeholders across the organic supply chain could not easily determine which operations
were legitimately certified as organic.
The Organic Integrity Database has changed all that.
INTEGRITY is a web-based application that manages information about certified organic
operations.
Certifiers around the world can submit data to the system anytime using role-based workflows
and permissions systems that facilitate both government and non-government access.
The public can access INTEGRITY data through any web browser or mobile device.
INTEGRITY accepts diverse data sets from 80 data providers of all sizes and technology
capabilities.
INTEGRITY offers many ways for data providers to engage with the system: on-screen data
entry, spreadsheet uploads, and application programming interfaces.
Automated data quality checks review all the data, and the system then immediately shows
the data to the public.
These options provide a range of options for our diverse group of data providers.
Now, USDA can track certified organic operations throughout the year, because certifiers can
add new operations and report changes to existing operations any time.
The organic industry and consumers can verify that products with the USDA organic seal are
legitimately certified.
Data quality has also improved, as the system provides automated data verification and validation.
This way, certifiers can directly control and correct published data.
INTEGRITY also provides a new, structured organic product classification system.
Previously, data sets included long text lists of products.
Now, certifiers can use the new taxonomy to structure their data.
INTEGRITY was built using an agile development approach, with active engagement by data providers
and users.
One of our first steps was to establish a central user group of certifiers.
These users were our top priority, because certifiers are the primary data providers
for the system – we needed to build something that was easy for them to use.
We heard what their priorities were, and built those into our plan.
Continuous user feedback aligned with the agile development methods and resulted in
our first system release.
Ongoing development has added several new modules, informed by ongoing stakeholder involvement.
The core functionality of INTEGRITY was built in less than a year, with the first release
in place within six months of our development kickoff.
By issuing a pre-acquisition request for information, we were lucky to find two terrific firms to
help us build Integrity.
One of these companies was easily available through an existing USDA contract vehicle.
This provided quick access to a vendor with experience in both agile development and experience
in the USDA technical environment.
We also contracted with a small business active in organic certification technology.
This provided a unique access point into the organic data provider community, and brought
highly specialized user-driven expertise for requirements and design.
INTEGRITY has received broad praise from the organic community.
Trade, industry, and consumers use INTEGRITY for market analysis and to search for and
check the certification status of organic operations and products.
Food processors are even using INTEGRITY to identify supply chain development opportunities.
Integrity is a great example of how technology investments and strong partnerships can support
market integrity and development.
Visit INTEGRITY at: organic.ams.usda.gov/integrity/