The Office of the Chief Economist opened a field office in Stoneville, Mississippi in October 1998. The Stoneville field office is co-located with Mississippi State’s Delta Research and Extension Center (DREC) and the USDA/ARS Mid-South Area Jamie Whitten Delta States Research Center.  The field office was established to build an agricultural weather network. The goal of the network is to link agricultural weather data collection networks already in existence but not part of the current National Weather Service (NWS) basic reporting network. In partnership with USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), Soil Climate Analysis Network (SCAN) sites were installed in the Delta to enhance the regional network.