NASS to Discontinue July Cattle Inventory, Other Select Data Collection
The USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) announced April 9 it is canceling the July Cattle report and discontinuing the Cotton Objective Yield Survey, as well as all County Estimates for Crops and Livestock beginning with the 2024 production year. The decision to discontinue these surveys and reports was not made lightly, but was necessary, given appropriated budget levels, NASS said in a release.
NASS has and will continue to review its estimating programs using criteria focused on the needs of its mission and customers to prioritize budget decisions. Information about all NASS surveys and reports is available online at www.nass.usda.gov.
The news was met with criticism from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. These reports provide critical data and the decision to end them is completely misguided, NCBA said.
“It is disingenuous for the same agency which touts its commitment to transparency in livestock markets to arbitrarily cease publication of reports which provide just that. While it may be politically expedient to blame appropriators in Congress for today’s decision, cattle producers know better than to believe discontinuing a handful of reports will result in substantive cost savings for the Department,” said NCBA Vice President of Government Affairs Ethan Lane. “NCBA calls on USDA-NASS to immediately reverse this decision and continue delivering on its stated mission of providing timely, accurate, and useful statistics in service to U.S. agriculture.”
“Of the three necessities of life, food, shelter and water, NASS provides critical details on the commodities that make up food and shelter,” said Chris Swift, Swift Trading Co., a commodity futures and options brokerage in Brentwood, Tenn. “Seemingly, it would be crucial to have this information readily available and continually updated in order to help produce a secure food production system. Unfortunately, due to poor government mismanagement, of literally everything, certain reports are being cancelled. While this is certainly not the first time, and most likely not the last, it is just another slap in the face of every producer out there by every government official that helped to promote this issue.”
