During the first two weeks of December, the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service asks farmers for their final harvest information including harvested acreage, production and storage. The Farm Service Agency and the Risk Management Agency, among many others, use this important information to serve farmers and ranchers with farm and risk management programs while NASS uses FSA data, in combination with remote sensing and survey data, to compile their reports.
The data compiled by NASS impacts many farms directly as it will be used to determine county crop yields for the ARC County program under the current farm bill.
NASS provides confidential, consistent, comparable data on a routine schedule year in and year out for use by USDA and by any farmer, rancher, researcher, educator, market analyst, agribusiness, commodity association or member of the public equally and at no cost, for their unique needs.
As always, individual responses to NASS surveys are kept confidential. Data are published in aggregate form so that no individual operation or operator can be identified. NASS data are NOT subject to Freedom of Information Act requests and are not used for taxation or regulation.
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