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USDA boosts survey numbers, but farmer response rates still lag

The USDA sent out more farmer surveys for the June acreage report, but Seth Meyer with MU’s Food and Ag Policy Research Institute says the response still wasn’t great.

“They compensate on pure response numbers by asking more people. That’s what they’re doing. A 39 percent response rate is still well below what they would like it to be.”

Meyer tells Brownfield increasing the number of surveys helps maintain the quality of the reports, but it isn’t a replacement for getting more producers to participate.

“I don’t think that this is the National Ag Statistics Service’s preferred method to try and kind of boost the validity of the report, but it’s what they have to keep doing in the short run to say, hey, farmers, we’re trying to maintain the validity of this report,” he says. “They still need those farmers to come along and they need to convince the farmers and this is a partnership in order to improve response rates.”

He says it’s also not a permanent solution for the USDA, and the agency still has some farmer trust to rebuild, given how much farmer response rates have lowered in the last five to six years.

“They are doubling down on their effort to be transparent. I think you even see that by them putting some things up in the front of the report. You know, there was a paragraph and up in the front of the report that talks about what does this yield estimate mean and what’s kind of the error bounds around this?”

The USDA has been working to improve data transparency.

Following feedback on ways to improve, the agency has previously said would like to increase the sample size of surveys of not just June, but also for the September, December and March reports.