URBANA, Ill. — Farmers and investors remained without key federal crop reports and market indicators as the government shutdown stretched to 23 days on Thursday, October 23. On that day, the University of Illinois College of ACES farmdoc team offered an impromptu live webinar discussion titled “Government Shutdown and Agriculture,” during which panelists talked about how the shutdown has already impacted data and reports for the sector, as well as farmers’ finances and access to services. The webinar’s panelists also looked ahead at future impacts on farm families if the shutdown continued.

“So far in October there are two reports from NASS that have not gone out, and they are what’s called principal economic indicator reports. These include the monthly crop production report and cattle-on-feed report, but there are other, smaller principal reports, including the weekly broiler report, monthly egg production report and monthly milk production report,” said Mark Schleusener, retired Illinois State Statistician for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). 

Even if USDA workers were to return to work as early as the next day (October 24), it would be unlikely that end-of-month USDA commodity reports could be prepared in time, according to Sarah Low, who worked for USDA’s Economic Research Service in Washington, D.C. for 10 years, including during the 16-day government shutdown of 2013. “Then we (would be) scrambling to get personnel and resources and machinery back online. Every time there is a shutdown there is a lot on the front end and the back end in addition to the time the shutdown is occurring,” she said. 

Schleusener, who issued state-level crop reports out of the USDA office in Springfield, Illinois, extrapolated on the data collection-to-publication process, which can take up to two weeks to complete. “The data collection process is typically contracted out to people who are not federal employees. For an October crop report you like to have your data collected by October 1, so your data collection starts a few days prior to October 1. Then there is processing and tabulation, maybe making a callback to someone who reported something unusual. Eventually we get to around the 12th of the month when we can release a crop production report,” Schleusener said.

“At the end of this month there should be a monthly prices report, but that also involves data collection from the grain elevators, from the ethanol plants and places that buy grain from farmers. That data collection should be ongoing now; it’s not. All the data collection has stopped as well as the federal employees’ efforts have stopped,” he added. 

Nick Paulson, an agricultural economist with the University of Illinois who was consulting in D.C. at the time of the shutdown, said he witnessed USDA offices with “bare bones” staffing before he returned to Illinois. “There was no one left there for me to really work with or be directed by,” said Paulson. “Work is piling up in these offices, which will create some delays.”

Another U of I economist on the panel, Joe Janzen, noted that the reports issued by USDA can have a profound effect on commodity markets. “We don’t know what would have happened to prices if there was an October WASDE (World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates) report. The effect on price levels is difficult to say because the directional impact of the report changes from month to month, so there tends to be a lot of price action because the markets are reacting to the report,” said Janzen. “Basically what happens during a shutdown is that the markets keep trading; they just have nothing to react to. Price volatility may be actually lower, or gets shifted around. It tends to concentrate around USDA reports.”

The next set of USDA reports farmers will not receive due to the shutdown are the December quarterly hog report and cattle-on-feed report, according to Schleusener. Importantly, USDA NASS, Farm Service Agency, Risk Management Agency and other employees will not be able to attend an important annual data users conference in 2025 due to the shutdown, he added.

With changes to federally subsidized crop insurance scheduled to be rolled out in 2026, U of I economist Gary Schnitkey said he was concerned about the lack of information around the new products from USDA to date. “Could the shutdown impact the release of 2026 (crop insurance) rates? Will we know what the changes are to be to crop insurance? We don’t know, but crop insurance agents would rather have this information sooner than later,” he said.  

A poll showed that 37 percent of farmers attending the webinar had so far been “slightly” impacted by the loss of USDA commodity reports, while 25 percent reported no impact. When asked if they’d had any issues accessing needed USDA services, 16 percent reported they had experienced problems, while 40 percent said they had issues with at least one USDA service. 41 percent reported they “hadn’t needed anything” from USDA since the shutdown began. 

Farmers received a break on October 23 when USDA temporarily re-opened over 2,000 FSA offices in order to facilitate the distribution of around $3 billion owed to farmers since last year