ABSTRACT
The Census of Agriculture has been conducted by the Bureau of the Census since 1840, and is currently undertaken in years ending in 2 and 7 with the most recent data coming from the 1992 survey. Responsibility for the Census of Agriculture was shifted from Commerce to USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service for the 1997 census. The Census of Agriculture presents data for the United States as a whole and then breaks it down by state, county, and for each zip code containing five or more farms. The National Resources Inventory (NRI) figures are probably more accurate than those of the Census of Agriculture. The NRI's use of sample sites is arguably superior to the survey techniques of the Census Bureau, and its inclusion of developed land categories is a major improvement on the agricultural census. The NRI does a better job of accounting for Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) land, and its ranking of farmland by quality is extremely useful.
