A lot of times when I do a story I turned to the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service in order to get data. For example, how many acres of wheat have been planted in Idaho for such and such a year. How much beef is being produced? What's the latest on corn production? Etc. etc. Obviously these data are provided by farmers and ranchers. Well the response rate among farmers to key government crop surveys has gradually fallen in recent years - according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture official. Joe Prusacki - Director of the Statistics Division at the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service - Joe says farmer response rates in recent rounds of the agency's quarterly agricultural surveys have been around 75-percent to 80-percent - down about five percentage points from a decade ago. Darin Jantzi works for NASS and he says the goal is to publish good county-by-county data: "We send out enough reports each year in order to be sure that we get enough reports if everybody responded. And we even send out more because we know we are going to have some refusals. We just unfortunately I not getting enough back from the producers in order to do that." Farmers who refuse to respond to NASS surveys may only be hurting themselves
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