Rural Economy

Subtopics

Commodity Costs and Returns Data: USDA has estimated annual production costs and returns and published accounts for major field crop and livestock enterprises since 1975. Cost and return estimates are reported for the U.S. and major production regions for corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, grain sorghum, rice, peanuts, oats, barley, sugarbeets, tobacco, milk, hogs, and cow-calf. These cost and return accounts are historical accounts based on the actual costs incurred by producers during each year.
12/12/2007
County Typology Codes: To provide policy-relevant information about diverse county conditions to policymakers, public officials, and researchers, ERS has developed a new set of county-level typology codes that captures differences in economic and social characteristics. This release revises the preliminary codes released in May 2004.
The 2004 County Typology Codes were developed for all 3,141 counties, county equivalents, and independent cities in the United States. Their primary function is to help differentiate among nonmetro counties, but metro counties are also coded to facilitate comparisons.
The 2004 County Typology codes classify all U.S. counties according to six non-overlapping categories of economic dependence and seven overlapping categories of policy-relevant themes. The economic types include farming, mining, manufacturing, services, Federal/State government, and unspecialized counties. The policy types include housing stress, low-education, low-employment, persistent poverty, population loss, nonmetro recreation, and retirement destination.
A preliminary version of these codes was released on the ERS website in May 2004. This is the final version and includes revised farming-dependent counties, along with five economic types that have not previously been released. More information on the revised farming-dependent counties can be found here http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/rurality/typology/. The policy types remain unchanged from the May 2004 release.
8/27/2004 12:00:00 PM
Creative Class County Codes: The creative class thesis—that towns need to attract engineers, architects, artists, and people in other creative occupations to compete in today's economy—may be particularly relevant to rural communities, which tend to lose much of their talent when young adults leave. The ERS creative class codes indicate a county's share of population employed in occupations that require "thinking creatively." A separate break-out of employment in the arts is also included. Data are provided for all counties in the U.S. for 1990 and 2000.
10/17/2007 12:00:00 PM
Farm and Farm-related Employment: Estimates of farm and farm-related employment are derived by combining farm employment data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis with an enhanced file of the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns. These estimates, which are rich in geographic detail, provide valuable information about the importance of agriculture across the country.
3/31/2005 1:00:00 PM
Federal Funds Data, Fiscal Years 1994-2001: This product contains information from the Consolidated Federal Funds Reports (CFFR), U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Governments Division. ERS aggregated the data to the county, State, region, and national level and computed totals by function, object, and ERS county and State types. The data include over 1,000 individual programs and near 100 aggregations by function and object. Not all of the programs have reliable data at the county level. A disposition code is provided to indicate level of accuracy. ERS county and State typology codes are also included in the data.
ERS00100 5/16/2005
Major Land Uses: This data series contains estimates for major land uses in the United States, by State, for 1945-2002. The series is the only consistent historical accounting of major land uses, public and private, in all 50 States. The latest inventory of U.S. major land uses finds that total cropland area in 2002 was 442 million acres, its lowest level since 1945. Several other classes and subclasses of land are considered, including forest, pasture and range, urban, and miscellaneous and special uses such as parks and recreational areas. The annual cropland portion of the series has been consistently maintained since 1910 and has recently been updated through 2006.
89003 12/21/2007 2:00:00 PM
Population Interaction Zones for Agriculture (PIZA): This data product provides information useful for projections of future changes in land use. ERS has created a system to classify remaining farmland into "population-interaction zones for agriculture" (PIZA). The PIZA codes are derived from a classification scheme that indexes small geographic areas (the contiguous 48 States divided up into five-kilometer grid cells) according to the size and proximity of population concentrations. These "population-interaction indexes" are designed to provide a cardinal measure of the potential interaction between nearby urban-related population and agricultural production activities in each grid cell.
6/1/2005
Profiles of America: Profiles of America: Demographic Data and Graphic Builder, uses interactive tools to create maps, tables, and charts that display information on demographic trends, industrial structure, and the economic well-being of rural and urban communities. The program allows users to analyze rural and urban differences at the national, State, and county levels and provides useful information to community leaders, Federal officials, and researchers.
11/2/2004 10:30:00 AM
Rural Definitions: Most Americans share a common image of rural—open countryside and small towns at some distance from large urban centers—but not a common consensus on where and how to draw the line between rural and urban. Dozens of definitions are currently used by federal and State agencies, researchers, and policy makers. The ERS Rural Definition data product allows users to make comparisons among nine representative rural definitions, for the U.S. as a whole and for individual States. We include socioeconomic indicators (population, education, poverty, etc.) that are commonly used to highlight differences between urban and rural areas. Three display options are available: national and state indicator tables; state-level maps; and an interactive mapping utility.
9/4/2007 10:15:00 AM
Rural/Urban Continuum Codes: The Rural-urban Continuum Codes allow researchers working with county data to break such data into finer residential groups beyond a simple metro-nonmetro dichotomy, particularly for the analysis of trends in nonmetro areas that may be related to degree of rurality and metro proximity. The codes form a classification scheme that distinguishes metropolitan (metro) counties by the population size of their metro area, and nonmetropolitan (nonmetro) counties by degree of urbanization and adjacency to a metro area or areas. The metro and nonmetro categories have been subdivided into three metro and six nonmetro groupings, resulting in a nine-part county codification. Data available for 2003, 1993, 1983 and 1974.
RUCC 8/7/2003 12:00:00 PM
State Fact Sheets: The ERS State Fact Sheets contain frequently requested data for each state and for the total United States. These include current data on population, per-capita income, earnings per job, poverty rates, employment, unemployment, farm and farm-related jobs, farm characteristics, farm financial characteristics, top agricultural commodities, top export commodities, and the top counties in agricultural sales. The latest (2007) data on unemployment and 2006 per capita income and earnings per job are now available.
5/12/2008 9:00:00 AM
Urban Influence Codes: ERS announces the release of the 2003 Urban Influence Codes, which classify U.S. counties by size of each county’s largest town and nearness to metropolitan and micropolitan areas. This scheme allows researchers to break county data down into smaller residential groups than metro, micro, and nonmetro. This is particularly useful for the analysis of trends in nonmetro areas that are related to population density and metro influence. The codes divide the Nation's 3,141 counties, county equivalents, and independent cities into 12 groups.
11/17/2003 9:00:00 AM $35.00
USDA Section 502 Housing Survey Data: The data available here are from the only nationwide survey of participants in USDA's Section 502 Single Family Direct Loan Housing Program. The survey was designed to provide information on the characteristics of the low-income rural residents who benefit from this program. All respondents who answered the survey questions were borrowers on a current Section 502 single-family direct loan taken from Rural Development administrative records. Data reported here are based on the responses of the borrower participating in the telephone interview. No distinctions are made between a primary or secondary borrower.
2/11/2002 9:00:00 AM

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