MOUNT VERNON — The deadline is fast approaching for farmers to return the mandatory 2007 agriculture census to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, although few area farmers see the value of the exercise.
“I don’t see what good all that information will do them,” said Fredericktown farmer Rick Ashcraft.
Ashcraft, who has already finished his census, said he has no plans to track down and make use of any of the farm statistics the government will be assembling.
“It’s just lucky that it came at the end of the year, so I already had my numbers gathered,” Ashcraft said.
He said he wouldn’t have minded the census so much if it hadn’t been so long and involved. He said it took a couple hours for him to finish the 24-page questionnaire.
Retired Fredericktown farmer Bill Brown had a quicker way.
“I just wrote ‘retired’ across the bottom, and I was done with it,” Brown said.
The census, carried out and analyzed by the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service every five years, is due by Monday. The form was sent to most large farms and a selection of smaller farms across the United States. It asks detailed questions about acreage, land, irrigation, insurance, crops, storage, forage, animals, production, sales and more.
Once gathered, the information in the census will be reported by the NASS in charts, figures and documents posted to the division’s Web site, www.nass.usda.gov. Anyone with a computer can view or download the reports, which contain a great deal of information about agriculture in the United States. Those wishing to receive agricultural reports can register their e-mail with Cornell University, which manages the Web site, and sign up for a mailing list. Those with a little computer spreadsheet experience can rearrange the data to reflect national, state or county data. The amount of data in some of these reports could make it difficult to download on a dial-up Internet connection, so high-speed connections are recommended.
As Ashcraft pointed out, however, all this data is historical in nature, and is of limited use in a pursuit that depends so much upon what happens in the future. This, he said, can make filling out the census feel like a futile endeavor.
“If we were sure what we’d have in the end, it’d be different; but we never are,” Ashcraft said.
According to the NASS, responses received on census reports are combined with others, so that no farm’s individual data is shown. NASS states all individual responses are kept confidential.
The NASS prepares and publishes the data to support the USDA farm program, reflecting figures for major grains, major oil seeds, edible beans, sugar crops, cotton and tobacco. Through cooperator programs with state agriculture departments, the NASS assembles figures for hay, minor oil seeds and fruit, as well as conducts an annual livestock inventory.
Critics of the census point out that its random sampling of smaller farms may well be under reporting the amount of family farming, hobby farming and organic farming going on in the United States.
