-----Original Message----- From: Charles Huyck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: MidNight Mapper<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Saturday, January 23, 1999 8:19 AM Subject: Farm guy from MapInfo-L >I know you as the farm guy on MIL and I had a few questions you might be >able to help me with: > >Is there somewhere where you can get better nation wide agricultural data >than exists in the census or NRI polygons? Agriculture counts its beans and its physical resources every five years versus every ten for the general population. Most of the data is organized by county although certain data is also organized by, I believe, ZIP code. You can get the seriess on CDROM which contains the last three ag-census series - most recent being 1992. The 1997 Ag Cencus will start to dribble out the "preliminary" sheets any time now if not already. It takes them about two to three years to publish the detailed tables depending upon the ag-politics at the time. http://www.census.gov/econ/www/agprogms.html (an intro - is it MapXtream or ?) http://www.census.gov/mp/www/rom/index.html#CDROM Each individual state has its county reporting. In addition the ERS (Economic Reporting Service of the USDA) has many estimates of production to meet its "Situation Reporting". http://www.usda.gov/nass/ The NRI, National Resourse Inventory, is a unique survey. It is based on hundreds of thousands of sampling locations many of which are "point" specific and others landscape generalizations. The individual sampling points are confidential and their geography truncated - normally to a county level. It is a very powerful series that when combined with county AgCensus information paints very interesting relationships between $ and erosion, cropping, yields and the like. The full NRI dataset for the entire country, including the soils data, (1:250,000) is about 1.3 gigabytes. The NRI dataset is available to the public on four CD-ROMs (ISO 9660 format) at $50 per disk. All files are flat ASCII files. Each disk contains tabular and spatial data for a collection of states that form a contiguous region. Each disk includes separate files containing the Soil Interpretations Records and spatial datasets for mapping NRI data. http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/TechRes.html To summarize: Every 5 years in sync with the Ag-Census, NRCS develops an inventory of the condition and trends of natural resources on non-Federal land. The "National Resources Inventory," or NRI, contains the most comprehensive and statistically reliable data of its kind in the world. It measures trends in soil erosion by water and wind, wetland losses, prime farmland acreage, irrigation, and habitat and conservation treatment at national, regional, State, and sub-State levels. The United States had 2.06 million farms in 1997, down less than 1 percent from 1996. A farm is defined as any establishment from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products was sold or would normally be sold during the year. The number of farms declined annually about 1 percent from 1987 through 1997, except for an increase in 1995 of less than half a percent which was due in part to a change in definition; the overall decline for the period was 7 percent. Land in farms continues to decline slowly; the total of 968 million acres in 1997 is down 0.2 percent from a year earlier and down 3.1 percent from 1987. Land in farms has declined every year since reaching its peak at 1.206 billion acres in 1954. The number of farms has declined at a faster rate than land in farms, with the average farm increasing from 451 acres in 1987 to 471 acres in 1997. Farms are commonly classified in size groups based on the total value of their gross farm sales. Data from the annual Farms and Land in Farms report from the National Agricultural Statistics Service show that the greatest number of farms is in the lower sales classes, with over 61 percent reporting gross farm sales of less than $20,000 in 1997. According to the survey, these small farms accounted for only 16.9 percent of the acreage operated. A relatively small number of very large farms produce the largest share of farm sales. Only 2.8 percent of the farms in 1997 were large operations with sales of $500,000 or more, but they operated 16.5 percent of the land. Average farm size increases consistently with sales class, ranging from 65 acres per farm in the less than $2,500 category to 2,773 acres for farms with receipts of $500,000 or more. >Is there yearly yield data that isn't interpolated between census years? Yes, at the State level. This may be more difficult to gain info on. Most states publish country by county estimates and actuals. The really valuable data is organized by the indivual Land Grant or State Universites. These are most typically very accurate, timely, and untill published not available due to effects on markets and all that stuff. The "professional" commodity traders like ConAgra, Contential Grain, etc genreate internally these estimates internally and publish them occasionally. If you are a commodity broker there are numerous sources of "current" estimates but very expensive to gain access to. Guessimates of "national" scale production can also be had from the weekly imagry of regions. See USDA site above. There are literally thousands working on the "food" estimates everyday worldwide. The USDA international estimates are generally so good many developing nation's rely on our USDA to tell them how they are doing. FYI MidNight Mapper 1/24/99 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put "unsubscribe MAPINFO-L" in the message body, or contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
