New Ag Census Data Has Corn Data and More

Harvesting corn silage in Pennsylvania

Greg Roth
Department of Crop and Soil Sciences
Penn State
March 1999

The 1997 Census of Agriculture Data has recently been released on the web and contains all kinds of data about corn and other aspects of agriculture. Data from national, state and county summaries can be found at the web address www.usda.gov/nass/.

I spent a half an hour pulling off some representative data to give me some background for my program here at Penn State. Here are a few examples of what I found in that half hour. I had a meeting coming up in Fulton County, so first I got some specifics on corn production and farming there. There are 201 full time farms in Fulton County, down from 212 in 1992. There are 74 dairy farms, down from 97 in 1992. There are 69 farms with sales of $100,000 or more. Farms that grew corn for grain in the county totaled 160 in 1997 and there were 141 that grew corn for silage. There were 6000 acres harvested for silage in 1997, producing 59,028 tons of silage (less than 10 tons/acre). This gave me a quick snapshot of the county's agriculture and trends.

Then I searched some of the state data for Pennsylvania. There are 159 pages of tables on Pennsylvania ag data available. I was interested in corn production, of course. In 1997, there were 18,732 farms that grew corn for grain compared to 21,610 in 1992- nearly 3000 less in a five year period. I assume some of this was due to the drought in 1997 that caused more folks to chop all of their corn. The number of farms growing corn for silage dropped as well, though: 12,598 in 1997 compared to 13,267 in 1992.

The census also points out that we have relatively few large corn growers. Of the 18,732 corn farms, 41 grow more than 1000 acres, and 160 grow from 500 to 1000 acres. There are also 433 that grow 250 to 500 acres of corn for grain. For silage, the census indicates we have 18 farms that grow more than 500 acres of silage.

There are lots of other facts and figures available on this site as well. I even found a tally of the number of used pickup trucks more than 4 years old in one table. This showed most farmers are driving older pickups. That was no surprise.

If you're interested in figures, for a program or presentation, or your just curious, check this site out. The census will also be available in print from the USDA this summer.