The Agriculture Department said it is launching reports on ethanol production and flour milling, three years after the Census Bureau ended the reports due to budget cuts. Later, USDA will revive reports on cotton consumption and stocks, oilseed crush, and fats and oils output, use and stocks. Congress allocated money to USDA to take over the work. “These reports are such an important element of sound economic policy planning and are used for market analysis, forecasting, and decision making that we knew we had to provide the data and I’m glad that beginning this year NASS is able to do just that,” said Joseph Reilly, head of the National Agricultural Statistics Service.
For the ethanol report, USDA will survey 200 refineries with total capacity of 14.8 billion gallons a year and for wheat, it will track 183 mills with daily capacity of 1.59 million hundredweight.
USDA intends to begin collecting data this fall and to begin issuing the reports in 2015, said a spokesman. Frequency of the reports is yet to be decided, he said. USDA created a home page for the Current Agricultural Industrial Reports, which links to the revived array of nine reports. It is available here.