Farm Data RFI

The purpose of amendment 2 is to answer the following list of questions: Question 1: We believe that FDA may benefit from a flexible data integration platform to join, verify, refresh, and model data from a wide array of sources, including inventory farm data, publicly available data sets such as Dun and Bradstreet or US Farm, as well as the agency's proprietary data. If this would be of interest, would the FDA be willing to entertain a response that envisions how such a project may be implemented? Alternatively, we would also welcome the opportunity to meet with the relevant program owners to demonstrate how we have supported similar work at other institutions. Answer: This is out of scope of the requirement and the FDA does not see additional benefit from going down this path. The systems that will intake this data already has a contractor assigned so it will not be in benefit for the FDA. Our immediate and pressing need is basic information about the names and locations of farms in the United States who are or maybe subject to the Produce Safety Rule. Question 2: One of the viable information source that we have identified is "US Farm Data" and the solicitation references "US Farm" in question #2. Are these two one and the same? Answer: Yes, the reference to "US Farm" in question #2 refers to "US Farm Data". Question 3: We can acquire and provide data for foreign farms. Do you currently have specific countries that are of top interest to FDA? Answer: This list is not all inclusive but would be primarily consist of the following: Mexico, Canada, Guatemala, Ecuador, Chile, Costa Rica, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Peru, Netherlands, New Zealand, China, Argentina, Colombia, Spain, Italy. It would also be nice to have: Israel, Korea, Brazil, Japan, Belgium, Thailand, Jamaica, Nicaragua, India, South Africa, Philippines, Morocco, France Vietnam, West Bank, Grenada, El Salvador, Belize, Uruguay, Panama, Haiti, and Australia. Question 4: Most data vendors require their data to be purged after the agreed period ends. Do you foresee this to be a problem after this contract has ended? We can make an arrangement to overcome this issue but wanted to know in advance since it may affect our pricing. Answer: FDA would desire to at least maintain an archive copy of the data (at least in hard copy). FDA would also consider the data its own data after we have visited or called the farm and verified the accuracy of the information. For example, once we went to a farm and did an inspection, we would consider the inventory information FDA gathered information. Likewise, if we did an informational visit to the farm and verified the accuracy of the information we would consider it our own. Question 5: Besides loading the data to FDA, would FDA need further data management support such as data cleansing, analytics, reporting, etc? Answer: Once the data is received as per the requirement, FDA currently has supporting resources to load the data into the FDA system.