2-3 IAN NASS Data

 Dr. John Foltz, who directs academic programs for the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at Moscow, joined the University of Idaho faculty in 1991, the year he earned his doctorate in agricultural economics from Purdue University. As associate dean of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Dr Foltz has been appointed to the USDA advisory committee on agricultural statistics. NASS collects data that drives commodity prices all over the world but he tells us getting the data presents a challenge: “Collecting data has become a little bit more difficult in this time of cell phones and much of NASS’s data is collected by enumerators who go out and interview people but some of it is collected by phone and as people give up their land lines and go to unlisted cell phone numbers it becomes a little bit more of a challenge to gather some of that data so trying to collect it takes innovation. Do the internet and Facebook play a role? Using all of those, we’re pretty fragmented today. It’s good because there’s all these great sources of information but it’s tough. Where do you get your information, how do you put it out, you have to go to all these places?”