The Agriculture Department plans to begin monthly reports in September or October on soybean crush, corn mill grind and cotton mill use, a senior official told reporters on Monday. The reports formerly were produced by the Census Bureau but were discontinued due to budget cuts. Congress decided early this year to give USDA the funds to take over the work, which includes a quarterly report on wheat products.
The reports provide valuable information on crop consumption and indirectly provide a cross-check of harvest size and current stockpiles.
Hubert Hamer, head of the statistics division of USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service, said the agency was in process of designing its questionnaires for the reports and compiling lists of companies to poll. USDA has not decided whether to release the material in the traditional format for a report or to load it into USDA databases the can be searched through the Quick Stats browser.
USDA has considered whether to abolish the “lock ups” that give news agencies an embargoed look at USDA reports before they are released, Hamer said. The inspector general at the Labor Department, as part of criticizing safeguards for a weekly jobs report, suggested the department should toughen its rules or abolish lockups. After its own inspector general found flaws, USDA tightened security at its lockups in recent months. Hamer said USDA regularly reviews its procedures for release of market-moving data.
“We do see an advantage of having multiple access points,” Hamer said in discussing lockups as well as posting the data on the Internet.