Statisticians are very careful people. I will document that in just a minute.

  Last week, I received my normal report from the National Agricultural Statistics Service in Boise and one of the items that I thought was encouraging and took notice of was the fact that the 1st cutting of alfalfa was underway across the entire Magic Valley. it also said that The Caribou extension educator reports most crops are planted and are ahead of schedule. Franklin county extension educator reports alfalfa is growing well and first cutting should be ready soon. So I called up media contact and statistician Vince Matthews to ask what was going on. Here he is: “I got your press release and it says that the 1st cutting of alfalfa is underway. Yes. Is that normal? Let’s see what it says here. Let me look back to last year and see what we were saying about the same time. Okay. About this time last year, we were talking about, we had our 1st cutting of alfalfa with any kind of numbers with it about the week ending 29 May last year so it might be a little bit ahead of what it was last year. Last year through the state it was 16% had completed the 1st cutting.”