By ANN HINCH
Assistant Editor

CHICAGO, Ill. — People who follow the commodities markets rely on USDA projections of planting intentions each spring, but not all of those people know how the agency collects its data.

Two weeks ago, MDA EarthSat Weather/CROPCAST hosted its annual Spring Agricultural Conference in Chicago. Before getting into weather projections for the year (published in last week’s Farm World) or futures market speculation, Lance Honig led the afternoon workshop with an overview of how the USDA gathers data for its planting reports published each March and June.

Honig, chief of the Crops Branch of the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), oversees the crop statistics program. He is responsible for briefing the USDA secretary on each report, which he said the secretary actually signs and releases to the press before reading it. The intent of this is that NASS employees are not political appointees and, as such, are not directed to alter the data they collect with any personal or party slant.

For the Prospective Plantings report, NASS sends a simple survey to 86,000 farms chosen at random from a list of all known farms across the country. The questions it asks – what is the farm’s planting intentions, and what is its current grains inventory – are answered and collected between Feb. 26-March 15 for a March 31 publication.

The same survey goes out to a similar number of farms in May for the June Acreage report, which is a follow-up to the Prospective Plantings, to see how accurate the March survey was. Honig said on average, there’s usually about 1 million acres of difference between the two for corn planted, and approximately 1.2 million acres’ difference for soybeans.

For obvious reasons, the June report is going to be more accurate because that report’s survey period coincides with actual planting time; farmers know the weather and their fields better than they do back in February.

“It is random,” Honig said of selecting the 86,000 farms, “but it’s not totally random.” He explained there is no certain size a farm has to be for potential inclusion in the survey, but larger producers are more likely to be surveyed, and more than once, simply because they represent more acres – for a more accurate statistical estimate.

In 2010, Honig said the NASS found growers intend to plant a total of 319.5 million acres across the United States to 21 main crops. This acreage is up only two-tenths of a percentage from last year.
Included in this figure are items that are double-cropped – for example, soybeans or corn, and wheat, rotated on the same acres at different times in the same survey year. This year, Honig said there are a lot of acres for which there is no wheat to count double.
While this might explain why in some states total acres are down from 2009 (or holding steady, if the state’s farmers intend to plant more corn and/or soybeans this year), he said in Iowa, wheat is not why corn acres are expected to be down 200,000 from last year.
“Iowa doesn’t grow winter wheat,” he said – or practically doesn’t, since it’s only 15,000 acres a year. “What happens with wheat (in Iowa) doesn’t influence what happens with corn and beans.”

In a state such as Illinois, however, wheat does make a difference. Honig pointed out how “two years ago, they had over a million acres of winter wheat in Illinois” – for 2010, that figure is down to 350,000.

Cotton planting intentions are up 15 percent from 2009, overall; even though three states show no change, others do, especially Texas farmers, who intend to plant an additional 80,000 cotton acres.

Some other crops seeing a reduction in planting from last year are barley (which is at a record low and 8 percent under 2009), oats, sorghum, sugar beets and potatoes. But others that are getting a boost in 2010 acres include corn, soybeans, rice, canola and dry edible beans.