Ms. Oriel Velez

Ms. Oriel Velez serves as a key procurement lead within the Farm Production and Conservation Business Center’s Acquisition Division under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where she manages technical and support service acquisitions critical to land conservation, soil health initiatives, and rural resource planning. Her responsibilities include soliciting, evaluating, and awarding contracts for engineering, data analytics, and field-level conservation support services that directly enable USDA’s mission of sustainable agricultural management. She routinely handles complex acquisitions under FAR Part 19 for small business set-asides, ensuring alignment with federal conservation objectives and technical compliance standards. Velez maintains consistent working relationships with a core group of contractors including PROJECTELLA LLC, HOMESTEAD SERVICES, LLC, and JANIE B LLC, which specialize in environmental consulting, land easement restoration, and rural infrastructure support. These partnerships reflect a pattern of sustained engagement with niche service providers capable of delivering site-specific conservation planning, geospatial analysis, and ecological monitoring. Her procurement approach emphasizes long-term vendor reliability and technical specificity over broad-scale commoditization. Her contracting portfolio is heavily skewed toward small business participation, with 74.2% of awards designated as total small business set-asides under FAR 19.5, supplemented by targeted HUBZone and Women-Owned Small Business set-asides. This reflects a deliberate, mission-driven commitment to expanding economic opportunity in rural communities while ensuring access to specialized expertise often found only in small, locally rooted firms. Her primary NAICS focus areas include 721110 (hotels and motels) for temporary field personnel lodging, 561720 (janitorial services) for facility maintenance at remote conservation sites, and 531320 (real estate appraisers) for land valuation in easement transactions. She also procures 115310 (forestry support) and 334519 (specialized environmental sensors), demonstrating deep technical familiarity with conservation science infrastructure and data collection systems essential to modern agricultural policy implementation.