Surveying the Industry

Surveying the Industry. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

Driving around the country I often wonder how many cows there are in a given field and then how many in the state and so forth. Bruce Ekland, Deputy Director of the Oregon Field office for the National Ag Statistics Service says they are the ones responsible for answering those questions.

EKLAND: Well good information leads to good decisions and we help the supply and demand get the information out there to know what the inventories of cattle. We do surveys continually including the January cattle survey. And we do surveys of other commodities that the industry pays us to do or the industries lobby Congress to mandate us to do. And so it’s to level the playing field so that the producer has the same information as the big agri-business does.

Ekland says that even though they have surveys going on all the time there are special surveys like the January cattle.

EKLAND: We have surveys going on in different periods. Some surveys like the Census of Agriculture is only once every 5 years, the January cattle is once every year and some surveys are more frequent. Some surveys like the pesticide use might be every few years.

The process of doing a survey can be a rather involved process and it changes depending on what is being surveyed.

EKLAND: The most common one is to ask the grower what he expects to produce or what he has. We do certain surveys for the purpose of forecasting where we have permission from the grower to take samples from his field and use regression analysis during the growing season to forecast what the end of production is going to be but something like cattle, you’re asking how many cattle do you have.

Obviously not each and every cow or bee or fish or grain of wheat is counted but through the use of various formulae a fairly accurate sampling can be done.

EKLAND: There can also be surveys such as Christmas trees, hazelnuts, vineyard and winery, various wheat quality and variety surveys that the industries come to us and asks us to do and they fund it. But it’s not proprietary so we’d release it to everybody at the same time.

Each state has their own NASS office and all the materials are handled through the main website at www.nass.usda.gov. Past survey information is free and accessible through that site.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.