Feds tighten belt by cutting agriculture reports

John Prince, left, and Kevin Hafner, right, vice pres­i­dent of oper­a­tions at Bob Funk’s Express Ranches in El Reno, Okla., move cat­tle into a pen. The U.S. Agri­cul­ture Depart­ment, which has been issu­ing cat­tle inven­tory reports in Jan­u­ary and July, is elim­i­nat­ing the July report. The USDA says it expects to cut about $10 mil­lion from its $156 mil­lion bud­get by elim­i­nat­ing or reduc­ing the fre­quency of reports in 14 indus­tries. (Asso­ci­ated Press File | Sue Ogrocki)

CHET BROKAW

Asso­ci­ated Press

PIERRE, S.D. — When farm­ers need to check honey prices so they can decide whether to sell, there’s been a report for that. And when cat­fish and sheep farm­ers want to check pro­duc­tion in their indus­tries, there’ve been reports for that, too.

The U.S. Agri­cul­ture Depart­ment has kept tabs for decades on a wide range of agri­cul­tural indus­tries that gen­er­ate bil­lions of dol­lars for the U.S. econ­omy. But that’s about to change, as the agency elim­i­nates some reports and reduces the fre­quency of oth­ers to save mil­lions of dol­lars in tight bud­get times.

The reports influ­ence the price and sup­ply of many prod­ucts that end up on Amer­i­can din­ner plates. With­out them, some farm­ers say they’ll be left guess­ing how much to pro­duce and when to sell. Food proces­sors and traders also will have less infor­ma­tion when mak­ing deci­sions about buy­ing and selling.

South Dakota farmer Richard Adee said he used the annual honey and bee report to decide when to sell his honey. If the Feb­ru­ary report indi­cated a large sup­ply nation­wide, he’d sell before prices dropped. If the sup­ply was short, he’d hold on to the honey and wait for prices to go up.

“It’s really going to limit us to infor­ma­tion for mak­ing future plans,” said Adee, one of the nation’s largest honey pro­duc­ers. “It’s not good. It’s not good we’re los­ing that.”

Adee Honey Farms, based in Bruce, S.D, pro­vide bees that pol­li­nate crops and pro­duce honey in the Mid­west, Cal­i­for­nia and Wash­ing­ton. Adee said he knows some­thing must be done to deal with the fed­eral deficit, but “they’re beat­ing up on agriculture.”

A spokes­woman for the USDA divi­sion that pro­duces the reports said it didn’t want to cut them but it had to do some­thing to save money. Elim­i­nat­ing or reduc­ing the fre­quency of 14 crop and live­stock reports will save the National Agri­cul­tural Sta­tis­tics Ser­vice about $10 mil­lion, Sue duPont said. NASS’s $156 mil­lion bud­get was cut in the fed­eral fis­cal year that ended Sept. 30 and more reduc­tions are expected this year as Con­gress and the White House aim to trim fed­eral spending.

The agency based its choices on the reports’ impact on mar­kets and use by other pro­grams that pro­vide assis­tance to farm­ers, along with the avail­abil­ity of infor­ma­tion from other sources, DuPont said.

“It was just tough deci­sions,” she said.

Roger Bar­low, exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent of Cat­fish Farm­ers of Amer­ica, said the annual report on his indus­try tells his organization’s 800 mem­bers how many mil­lions of tons of cat­fish are being pro­duced in how many acres of water, how much is being held by proces­sors and what prices are being paid. The infor­ma­tion deter­mines prices and guides farm­ers as they decide to expand or cut back pro­duc­tion, he said.

“Lots of deci­sions are made upon this,” Bar­low said. “This infor­ma­tion is used on a daily basis.”

Mis­sis­sippi is the lead­ing cat­fish pro­ducer accord­ing to the lat­est and last report. But the farm­ers, who are mostly located in the South, hope NASS with recon­sider its deci­sion to dump the report.

“I guess we’re just scratch­ing a hole in our head try­ing to fig­ure out how we’re going to con­tinue with what we feel is extremely impor­tant,” Bar­low said.

Most of the infor­ma­tion in the reports being cut will still be included in the agri­cul­tural cen­sus, which is con­ducted once every five years. The one released in 2013 will reflect the state of farm­ing in 2012.

But the lack of annual reports “kind of lim­its what we have as far as infor­ma­tion for mak­ing deci­sions on a year-to-year basis,” said Shane Ellis, a live­stock econ­o­mist at Iowa State University.

Farm­ers in some indus­tries may turn to trade orga­ni­za­tions to col­lect infor­ma­tion pre­vi­ously reported by NASS, while those in smaller ones, such as honey and cat­fish, might be able to get by with­out the data, he said.

“It’s just the nature of the niche mar­ket­ing in how it tends to be more of a mar­ket where every­body knows every­body else. … They have a good idea of where every­thing is going,” Ellis said.

He spec­u­lated on the logic behind NASS’s deci­sions. For exam­ple, the agency is cut­ting its July report on the cat­tle indus­try but will keep a sim­i­lar one in Jan­u­ary. Ellis said the agency prob­a­bly elim­i­nated its sheep and goat report because sheep num­bers haven’t changed much in recent years.

But Steve Clements, who raises sheep near Philip, S.D., said the report would be par­tic­u­larly valu­able right now because there’s a short sup­ply of breed­ing ewes and no one is sure where sheep being shipped from drought-stricken Texas are end­ing up.

“The ones that don’t affect you, you don’t think they need to do, I guess,” he said.

Posted by AP News on Oct 28 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.