2012 Census of Ag

2012 Census of Ag. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

It has taken a while to crunch the numbers but finally the 2012 Census of Ag has been officially released to the public in its entirety. The unveiling was made on Friday via a webcast with Hubert Hamer, Director, Statistics Division of USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service and Joe Reilly, Administrator, for USDA’s NASS made the announcement.

REILLY: One of the key things we will be covering is information on farms and it’s important to know what is a farm as we define it. The definition of a farm is any place or operation which would have produced $1000 value of agricultural products or sold them during the census year or normally would have sold them in the census year.

That’s Joe Reilly who says they mailed out a little over three million forms. Hubert Hamer says besides the drought in the midwest there were some other factors that affected the data.

HAMER: We had record corn prices, record soy bean prices, record hay prices. We had extremely damaged pasture conditions across the United States and we also had a significant depopulation of our cattle industry during that year so not your typical year.

The complete report is available online at www.agcensus.usda.gov.

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