About CropReview

Why USDA NASS crop data deserves a public-facing home

The U.S. Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) is the federal source for crop production and farm economics data. NASS publishes the Quick Stats database covering planted acres, harvested acres, yield per acre, total production, and cash receipts for every major U.S. crop and every state. The data is public, free, and updated on a quarterly-to-monthly cadence depending on the crop. NASS also runs the Census of Agriculture every five years for deeper farm-level detail.

The presentation problem is that NASS Quick Stats is built for agricultural economists, not for the broader audience of journalists, policy analysts, and farm-state readers. Quick Stats requires the user to know the crop code, the year range, and the geographic scope before producing useful output. CropReview presents the same NASS data per-crop and per-state, with the trend chart already drawn and the most-recent year already current, so readers can answer ’how is corn doing in Iowa this year’ without having to learn the NASS taxonomy first.

How the pipeline pulls NASS data

The pipeline pulls from the NASS Quick Stats API on a monthly cadence — more frequently for crops in active reporting periods (planting progress, harvest progress) and less frequently for crops in dormant periods. Each pull touches every major crop at the state level and aggregates to the national level. The site stamps the NASS report date on every value.

A practical detail: NASS reports a planted-acres figure during the spring planting season and a harvested-acres figure during the fall, and they often differ — abandoned acres, double-cropped acres, and weather-driven replanting all change the relationship between planted and harvested figures. The site shows both where both are reported, with a note explaining the gap. Yield per acre is computed on harvested acres, not planted acres.

Where farm data has caveats

Three caveats. First, NASS production estimates are revised through the season. The first August soybean production estimate is typically revised in September, October, November, and the final January value can differ noticeably from the initial August estimate. The site shows the most recent NASS report value and notes that estimates revise.

Second, county-level data is less complete than state-level data. For sensitive cases (small numbers of farms, dominant single-grower situations), NASS suppresses county-level data to protect individual farm privacy. The site shows suppressed values explicitly rather than imputing.

Third, NASS reports physical production (bushels, pounds, tons) and value of production (dollars), but the value figure uses an average price for the marketing year, which differs from individual farm-gate prices that vary by quality, contract, and location. The pages note this when showing revenue figures. Every value links back to the originating NASS report for verification.

Why state-level farm income matters beyond agriculture

Farm income is a leading indicator for rural economic health in ways that the headline GDP figure does not capture. Roughly 350 U.S. counties — concentrated in the Great Plains, the upper Midwest, and the Mississippi Delta — are farm-dependent, meaning farm income makes up more than 25 percent of personal income. In those counties, the year-over-year swing in farm cash receipts directly drives main-street retail, equipment dealer sales, and the property-tax base that funds local schools and roads. A bad year for corn prices is a bad year for the John Deere dealer two towns over and a difficult budget cycle for the rural school district.

State-level farm income also moves with federal policy more than most economic categories. The federal farm bill, which is reauthorized roughly every five years, sets commodity-program payments, conservation-reserve payments, and crop-insurance subsidy levels that meaningfully shift farm cash receipts. Trade policy adds another layer: a tariff dispute that closes a major export market for soybeans or pork can erase a percentage of a state’s farm income within a single marketing year. CropReview shows the resulting income figures from NASS without separating the policy-driven share from the market-driven share, but the methodology page links to the USDA Economic Research Service analyses that do.