National Agricultural Statistics Service
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| Agency overview | |
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| Jurisdiction | Federal government of the United States |
| Headquarters | Washington, D.C. |
| Minister responsible |
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| Website | http://www.nass.usda.gov/ |
The National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) is the statistical branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System. NASS has 12 regional offices throughout the United States and Puerto Rico and a headquarters unit in Washington, D.C.. NASS conducts hundreds of surveys and issues nearly 500 national reports each year on issues including agricultural production, economics, demographics and the environment. NASS also conducts the United States Census of Agriculture every five years.
During the Civil War, USDA collected and distributed crop and livestock statistics to help farmers assess the value of the goods they produced. At that time, commodity buyers usually had more current and detailed market information than did farmers, a circumstance that often prevented farmers from getting a fair price for their goods. Producers in today's marketplace would be similarly handicapped were it not for the information provided by NASS.
The creation of USDA's Crop Reporting Board in 1905 (now called the Agricultural Statistics Board) was another landmark in the development of a nationwide statistical service for agriculture. A USDA reorganization in 1961 led to the creation of the Statistical Reporting Service, known today as National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS)[1].
The 1997 Appropriations Act [2] shifted the responsibility of conducting the Census of Agriculture from U.S. Census Bureau to USDA. Since then the census has been conducted every five years by NASS. Results from the 2012 Census of Agriculture were released on May 2, 2014 [3].
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