The Agriculture Department faces a vexing problem: Its crop reports can move markets but fewer and fewer farmers are taking part in the surveys that assure the USDA estimates are accurate. “From response rates of 80-85 percent in the early 1990s, rates have fallen below 60 percent in some cases,” write USDA chief economist Robert Johansson and Mississippi State University economist Keith Coble.
“Of greater concern, there appears to (be) an acceleration in the decline in the last five years or so, suggesting the possibility that this decline reflects a long-term permanent change,” they write at farmdoc Daily.
The USDA is not alone. Other government and academic survey have experienced similar declines in response rates. Johansson and Coble say lower response rates drive up the cost of the surveys and make it harder to operate programs such as the Agriculture Risk Coverage subsidy, which uses county yields as a factor in determining payments.
“For now, the best approach remains encouraging greater producer response,” say the economists, after discussing approaches such as remote sensing, modeling and data mining. “The value of and need for responses may best be tied back to why USDA was asked to provide such reports many decades ago – to assure the availability of information on the agriculture sector to all participants.”