The Cattle report issued in July contains inventory numbers of all cattle and calves in the United States. The U.S. and Canadian Cattle report is a joint effort of Statistics Canada and NASS to report the number of cattle and calves by class and calf crop for both countries within one publication.
NASS published the January Cattle report on January 29, 2016, and will publish the U.S. and Canadian Cattle report, which uses data from the January Cattle report, on March 8, 2016.
“Before deciding to suspend these reports, we reviewed our estimating programs against mission- and user-based criteria as well as the amount of time remaining in the fiscal year to meet our budget and program requirements while maintaining the strongest data in service to U.S. agriculture,” the agency said. “The decision to suspend this report was not made lightly, but was necessary, given our available fiscal and program resources. We will continue to review our federal agricultural statistical programs using the same criteria to ensure we provide timely, accurate and useful statistics.”
The July report previously was suspended by USDA due to budget reasons, but the agency had restarted its publication. However, it’s clear that this is one of the first reports that NASS is ready to suspend in times of tighter budget conditions. It’s not clear whether there will be a push on Capitol Hill to boost resources for NASS to resume publication of the data as happened previously.