Getting Crop Reports Back Up

USDA NASS compiles objective yield information on the fall harvested crops during the months of August, September, October and November. The government shutdown halted that process and the October release was cancelled. Joe Prusacki - Director of the Statistics Division for NASS - says it will be possible to use some of the October data to help calculate the November report - but there are a couple of things to consider.

PRUSACKI: We have two surveys that go into that. One is what we can the Ag Yield which is a farmer survey and the other is our Objective Yield survey which is where we go out to the field. Our data collection period for the farmer survey started September 27th and so we had basically Friday night calling, Saturday and the phoning on Monday and the data collection period was supposed to run through October 4. We had less than half our sample that we even attempted to contact somebody. So I mean we had a sample like almost 13-thousand and we had just a little over 5-thousand individuals that we had attempted to contact.

So less than half of the farmers were contacted prior to the government shutdown. On objective yield - Prusacki says the data collection was wrapping up - but many of the lab samples were sent by the 27th or 28th of September. When the government shutdown on September 30th - he says those samples continued coming in and have just been sitting in the labs since October 1st.

PRUSACKI: We got a big shipment of data of these samples in yesterday that was fairly high moisture corn. It had been sitting in plastic bags for two weeks.

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