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NASS prepares for Ag Census data gathering
USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service is preparing for the 2017 Census of Agriculture. Every five years the agency counts U.S. farms and ranches, those who operate them and what they produce.
Missouri Statistician Bob Garino says questionnaires are mailed at about the first of the year with follow-up mailings to those who don’t respond.
“And then we’ll also do some collection by phone and we’ll do some data collection by actual personal interview,” said Garino, Tuesday during an interview with Brownfield Ag News. “We have some enumerators around the country that live in rural areas and we ask them to help us out.”
There are producers who avoid submitting data for the census because they worry about breaches of privacy, but Garino says responses are protected by law.
“Any individual information is confidential, it’s not subject to Freedom of Information Act requests,” he said. “It’s not shared with any other governmental agency, not the IRS, not the tax assessor, we don’t even share it with other USDA agencies, so it’s internal to NASS.”
Information collected for the Census of Agriculture covers land use and ownership, operator characteristics, production practices, income and expenditures.
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