By Karl Plume and P.J. Huffstutter
BOONE, Iowa, Sept 1 (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Agriculture is launching a pilot project that relies more heavily on technology as part of an effort to improve its closely watched U.S. crop acreage and yield estimates, Secretary Brooke Rollins said on Tuesday, in the face of mounting criticism over the reliability of government data.
Rollins discussed USDA’s data modernization plan at the Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa, following a month-long series of listening sessions with farmers and agricultural groups that have exposed frustrations with the Trump administration as the farm economy struggles.
“We will conduct a pilot to evaluate the use of improved satellite imagery, working with NASA and other federal government agencies across the country to figure out how we can make this reporting more accurate,” Rollins said during the show.
Farmers have criticized the deep staff cuts at the USDA, saying it has affected data collection and accuracy. They have raised questions in particular about the National Agricultural Statistics Service, whose closely watched reports can move commodity markets, affect the prices crop farmers get for their harvests and influence federal farm programs.
After the USDA released its January final estimates, already low grain prices sank more than 5%, at a time when growers were struggling to make money.
The project will use geospatial tools and crop models alongside farmer polls to estimate crop acreage and yields. The department also said it would explore the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The goal is to make it easier for farmers to share information with USDA, such as putting polls online or pre-populating data fields with information the USDA already has, which could help improve response rates, said Scott Hutchins, USDA’s under secretary for research, education, and economics.
USDA has tried to modernize data collection in the past, and some of those efforts have taken years to roll out. While Hutchins did not provide a detailed timeline for the project, he vowed more rapid results. “We’re gonna have results by the end of the term, for sure,” he said.
DATA RELIABILITY QUESTIONED
Farmers gathering at the Farm Progress Show said many of the USDA’s traditional data gathering processes were long overdue for an update.
“Some of these methods have not changed since the 1970s,” said Jeff Mundorf, an Iowa farmer visiting the show. “These are big projects for one administration and there’s only so much they can do, but I’m optimistic.”
The announcement follows complaints about the reliability of department data from farmers, grain traders and economists after deep staff cuts and unprecedented increases between initial and final estimates of how many acres of corn U.S. farmers planted in 2025.
Rollins’ trip to Iowa this week comes after the non-partisan election analysis group Cook Political Report shifted Iowa’s U.S. Senate race from “lean Republican” to “toss up” in the agriculture-dominated Republican stronghold, where farmers have struggled with tariffs, and rising diesel and fertilizer costs in the wake of the Iran war.
Democrats need to win all their current seats and pick up four more to take control of the U.S. Senate.
USDA launched its listening sessions in Minnesota on August 4. Rollins plans to host more sessions through this fall, USDA spokesman Harry Fones told Reuters on Tuesday.
In those sessions, farmers have criticized the reliability of USDA statistics, staffing cuts and other Trump administration policies that have affected the farm economy. Rollins herself has acknowledged the loss of confidence, saying USDA needs to rebuild farmers’ trust in its data.
They also have at times become forums for farmers to vent broader grievances. When Rollins visited the Iowa State Fair last month, she faced criticism from cattle producers over Trump’s announcement that the United States would increase imports of beef — a move intended to lower consumer prices but which producers feared would hurt cattle prices.
(Karl Plume reported in Boone, Iowa, and P.J. Huffstutter in Chicago. Editing by Emily Schmall, Aurora Ellis and David Gaffen)
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