Census of Agriculture

The purpose of a census is to enumerate all objects with a defined characteristic. For the census of agriculture, that goal is to account for "any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the census year." To do this, NASS creates a Census Mail List (CML) of agricultural operations that potentially meet the farm definition, collects agricultural information from those operations, reviews the data, corrects or completes the requested information, and combines the data to provide information on the characteristics of farm operations and farm producers at the national, State, and county levels. There are approximately 3 million records on the CML.

1) Linking at an operation level can only be accomplished using data from 2007 and later. Due to how the frame was maintained prior to 2007, these datasets cannot be accurately linked to later datasets. 2) Linking 2007 and later census data by operation will result in many records that will not have a match due to reasons such as nonresponse and changes in operations. 3) Please consult with NASS if you intend to link census data to survey data by operation. Due to the low match rates, fitness for use is reduced and therefore linking is discouraged. 4) For Census and ARMS there is no benefit to linking due to NASS’ data collection strategy. During a Census year any respondent to ARMS is not required to fill out a Census questionnaire to reduce respondent burden. Instead, their ARMS questionnaire responses are copied directly into a Census response.