A Centenary Profile of Methods for Agricultural Surveys

Abstract

The Early Years . One hundred years .ago crop reporting was officially established in the U. S. Department of Agriculture by a $20,000 item in the Appropriation Act. The Depart. ment was then only four years old. Long before that time the need for statistical information was realized and limited efforts to supply it had been made, but it .was not until 1866 that USDA began issuing nationwide crop reports on a continuous basis. Data from the decennial ceDllUsesof agriculture, first taken in 1840, were basic to the calculation of esti· mates. Intercensal published reports were based upon inquiries sent to farmers, who were requested to an· swer for the localities with which they were familiar rather than their farms, on the assumption that the wider coverage would provide more accurate results. The most important factors involved in selecting cor· respondents were evidently good geographic representa. tion and intelligent, literate farmers with ability to judge crop prospects and year-to·year changes. The inquiries requested information on acreage harvested and numbers of livestock as a percentage of last year. Farmer reporters also were asked annually to give information on prices received for agricultural products and wages paid to farm laborers. Condition and yield per acre of crops were generally published as State and national averages of reporters' returns, as were prices and wage rates. Percentage changes in acreages of crope harvested and in numbers of livestock were published as reported or as adjusted together with the calculated estimates of State and na· tional totals. Very early in the history 'of crop and livestock reporting, the statistici8Dllrecognized response error as a major source of error in some iDlltances.A good exam· pIe was cash crop bias resulting from the tendency of the crop reporters to be over-conservativein reporting condition and yield per acre of crops grown for sale, especiallybefore much of the crop was sold. Parenthetically, it should be noted that census returns suffered from this same cash-crop bias, though to a lesser extent because CeDllUses were ordinarily taken at post-harvest and often post-sale dates. There was also an apparent failure of the year·to-year changes indicated by farmers' reports to reflect the rapid changes in crop acreages and livestock numbers that were taking place in the expanding agriculture of the period. The art of statistics was still in its infancy, as evidenced by statements issued with some early reports on such elemental matters as the definition of a weighted average