The National Agricultural Statistics Service will reinstate or retain 10 reports previously lost to cost-cutting measures.
They include its annual reports on Farm Numbers, Farm Income and Land in Farms; and its Fruit and Vegetable in-season forecast and estimates.
The other eight reports deal with rice stocks; hops production; floriculture; catfish and trout; sheep and goats; cattle; bees and honey; plus mink, according to a news release.
NASS will soon publish Federal Register notices reflecting the program changes, according to a news release from the Agricultural Statistics Board of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
NASS will make available any data that falls outside the scope of the agricultural estimates programs in the five-year Census of Agriculture. The next census will be conducted beginning January 2013 to reflect activities in 2012.
Efficiencies gained in 2011, including a new operations center in St. Louis that centralizes data collection, made reinstatement of the reports possible, according to the release.
In July, NASS reinstated agricultural labor surveys and reports. The agency had said in May it would not publish the April farm labor report due May 19. The July and October surveys and reports were also cancelled because of budget constraints.
Cutting them would have saved $310,000 — or .001% of the $23.9 billion USDA allocation President Barack Obama proposed in his 2012 budget.
Those quarterly reports, which compile data from about 6,000 farms nationwide, include the number of agricultural workers, hours worked and wage rates. Data are used to project agricultural productivity. Wage rate data are used to set wages for the H-2A agricultural worker program.
