Feds tighten belt by cutting agriculture reports

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.