Census of Agriculture Data Needed for Localizing Ag Programs

Census of Agriculture Data Needed for Localizing Ag Programs

Lorrie Boyer
Lorrie Boyer
Reporter
Hubert Hamer, National Agricultural Statistics Service Administrator says the data collected from the 2022 Census of Agriculture report is important for local communities.

“Uniform local data at the local level. It helps with decision making, not at the just a national level. If you look at some of the weather patterns, we're having you have disasters almost every other week for farmers to be made whole. You need information to help, you know, identify what are the commodities in those areas? What are the prices of those commodities. So we want to make sure that, you know, again, when you start looking at the farm, the Farm Service Agency programs, they use a lot of information from the Census of Agriculture risk management tools that the producers use, they're very, very popular. You need sound information to base those programs on and of course other foreign policy.”

Hamer explains that this is the largest data collection activity for his agency.

“In a nutshell, it measures the structure of US agriculture, how many producers how many farms, the value the demographic characteristics of farmers and ranchers from all over the country.”

Hamer says they have had a strong online response rate double what it was in the 2017 Census of Agriculture online rates. He reminds farmers ranchers all data provided is protected safe and is not shared with any other organization.

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