By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER
Ohio Correspondent

REYNOLDSBURG, Ohio — The USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) gathers numbers on the things that make farming go ‘round: production of crops, the inventory of livestock, the prices that farmers pay and receive and the use of agricultural labor. NASS also conducts the Census of Agriculture every five years on the national and state levels.

“We have NASS offices in 43 states – the New England states are combined into a single office,” said James E. Ramey, director, USDA/NASS’s Ohio Field Office. “Our agency dates from about 1900. The statistics go back into the 1800s.”

“We publish the statistics for whomever needs them to use,” Ramey said. “Our program is established, some of it through congressional mandate, some of it is financed based on the needs of agriculture for the USDA programs, for analyzing those and deciding what changes need to be made.”

The government is the biggest, but not the only user of the results. Farm Bureaus use the results in their analysis of agricultural policy and base their lobbying on some of that analysis, Ramey said. State departments of agriculture use it for somewhat the same thing. Private companies use it for determining, where supplies might be located.

“Railroad companies often times use our projections for production so they can try to have rail cars in place when they need it,” Ramey said. “Sometimes that is not very successful.”

NASS gathers its information through surveys of farmers and agribusiness groups; data is often gathered by telephone interviews and by mail questionnaires. By means of a reimbursable agreement the National Assoc. of State Departments of Agriculture provides personnel to interview farmers in the field.

“For the crop and weather series done from April to November we use reporters,” Ramey said. “We tend to go back to the same reporters for that week after week kind of by mutual agreement. They agree to do it and they’re good enough that we want to keep using them.”

“The one thing that is very important to us is that the data we collect from individual producers or individual agribusinesses is confidential,” he said. We do not disclose any individual’s data that we have collected.”

Also, all of the reports are released first from the headquarters from the agricultural statistics board, Ramey said. For commodity reports, several states have been designated as speculative states. The reports that are speculative such as corn production, corn yield, soybeans, wheat, and others are produced under lockup conditions.
“The data and the people that are preparing the final reports are locked up for probably six to eight hours as they tabulate the information across the states and prepare the report for national release,” Ramey said. “Those crop reports are released at 8:30 in the morning on the day designated for release.”

Everybody gets the reports at the same time, Ramey said. Those are traded commodities, and if someone had access to the data ahead of everybody else they potentially could make a killing on the market.

Ramey has worked for NASS and its predecessor agency for more than 45 years. He has seen great changes in agriculture.
“The increase in productivity in all kinds of agriculture for those 45 years is phenomenal,” he said. “In crop production we have yields of corn and soybeans that probably are two to three times as much as normally would have been expected in the beginning of my career.”

Improvements in genetics has made livestock production more efficient. The size of farms has changed over – mostly there are fewer, larger farms.

The number crunching that goes on in the NASS office has changed dramatically, from adding machines and old mechanical calculators “the size of typewriters,” he said. Now the agency uses database technology with standardized processes used across the country.
“We’re putting in more reliance on databases than we ever have before and that is a good thing that keeps us from duplicating data in a number of files and possibly using the wrong file,” Ramey said.