Market Matters Blog

Industrial Reports to Make a Comeback in 2015

Agriculture industrial reports on wet and dry ethanol milling, flour milling, oilseed crush and cotton suffered from the Census Bureau's budgetary axe in 2011, but USDA announced on Monday it's ready to put the reports on 2015 calendar.

"As soon as the Census Bureau announced they were discontinuing the Current Industrial Reports, we began hearing from agriculture stakeholders around the country about the impact this decision had on the industry," said NASS Administrator Joseph T. Reilly. "These reports are such an important element of sound economic policy planning and are used for market analysis, forecasting, and decision making that we knew we had to provide the data and I'm glad that beginning this year NASS is able to do just that."

P[L1] D[0x0] M[300x250] OOP[F] ADUNIT[] T[]

USDA officials announced they'd be taking over the Current Agricultural Industrial Reports last year, and they've been spending a lot of time since then building contracts with the industries involved and establishing a baseline.

The ethanol production and flour milling baselines are a little farther along than their oilseed crush baselines, a NASS spokesperson told DTN.

The agency will work with 200 ethanol production facilities representing capacity of 14.792 billion gallons of annual production. NASS plans to survey 183 flour milling facilities with a reported 24-hour milling capacity of 1,594,755 hundredweight, USDA stated in a press release.

It's tougher to gather a baseline for the oilseed data because the industrial reports cover a much broader industry, like salad dressing manufacturers, and USDA has to build a whole new set of contacts, the NASS spokesperson said. The Census's soybean crush data was perhaps the most-missed report. Its absence left the less thorough survey of National Oilseed Processors Association members as the key market indicator.

The NASS spokesman said the hope is to start releasing all of the industrial reports in 2015, but he couldn't specify when each report will be released. USDA did publish a new website on the surveys with more details. You can find it here: http://www.nass.usda.gov/…

(CZ/SK)

P[] D[728x170] M[320x75] OOP[F] ADUNIT[] T[]
P[L2] D[728x90] M[320x50] OOP[F] ADUNIT[] T[]

Comments

To comment, please Log In or Join our Community .