The past 12 months made for an eventful year in the world of agricultural statistics. In its efforts to remain true to its stated mission of providing timely, accurate and useful statistics, the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) transformed several of its programs and tackled research to keep up with the data needs of a changing agricultural industry. These new initiatives ensure that NASS continues to serve farmers, ranchers and rural communities across the nation and that decisions impacting U.S. agriculture continue to be based on factual data.
Some of NASS’s most transformative work in 2015 included the following five initiatives:
- Publishing the Tenure, Ownership, and Transition of Agricultural Land (TOTAL) survey results. These data provided the first insight since 1999 into the future of rural America, as NASS looked into who owns U.S. farmland and what the transition and succession intentions are for that land over the next decade.
- Evaluating farm typology data from the 2012 Census of Agriculture. The report looked into all aspects of family farms and provided new insight that allows the USDA to better evaluate programs that support family farms as well as young and/or beginning farmers.
- Launching a new survey program that looks into microbial safety practices on U.S. farms. NASS launched this program jointly with USDA’s Economic Research Service. The program is currently collecting these data, and once the results are compiled and published, they should help shape new food safety outreach and guidelines.
- Collecting data nationally for the Conservation Effects Assessment Program. This is a major project sponsored by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The results of the survey give a firsthand look into how operators manage agricultural lands for tomorrow. This insight is important because soil erosion, climate change, water shortages and feeding ever-increasing populations are important societal concerns.
- Changing the way it collects statistics about women and beginning farmers and ranchers. Recognizing that agriculture is changing, NASS launched a series of discussions to ensure that its data properly counts women and new entrants into the field. While NASS is still working on determining the best approaches, 2015 saw the launch of this project that should prove to be crucial to the future of U.S. agriculture.