Ag census data available by watershed

Washington Ag Today June 5, 2009 For the first time, results from the Census of Agriculture have been published at the watershed level by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service. Joe Riley of NASS explains the detail that is available.

Riley: “If you look at our website you will see a watershed publication. It will have the 20 major watershed areas around the United States. And within each one of the 20 major watershed areas we have that subdivided further down into 376 smaller, we‘ll call them six digit watershed areas that make up that larger area. You can determine what are the uses of the land. Is the land in that watershed area how much is cropland, how much is pasture land? Within in that we can tell what types of crops or commodities are grown on the land in that watershed. We can look at the number and volume and type of livestock that live in that watershed area. And then we can also look at, if people are interested, in the amount of fertilizer of pesticides that were applied within that watershed area.”

In Washington the census data is broken down into several water basins, the Pend Oreille, Spokane, Upper Columbia, Yakima, Lower Snake, Middle Columbia, Lower Columbia, Washington Coastal and Puget Sound.

Information from the 2002 Census of Agriculture is published alongside the 2007 Census results to demonstrate changes in land use, production practices and livestock distribution over the past five years.

I’m Bob Hoff and that’s Washington Ag Today on the Northwest Ag Information Network.