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Everyone can get customized data summaries online for:
- Farm Structure and Finance
- Crop Production Practices
- Commodity Production Costs and Returns
- Featured States
The data summaries are provided by the on-line
data tool at http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/ARMS/.
ARMS data enable ERS to publish annual estimates of average
income for
U.S. farm operator households. ERS also uses ARMS
data to produce annual cost-of-production
estimates for over 15 agricultural commodities used
in analyzing farm commodity prices. In preparing a periodic
report on family farms, required by the Food and Agriculture
Act of 1977, ERS draws on ARMS data for a range of information,
including:
- Farm participation in agricultural programs, and
the distribution of farm program payments
- Structure and organization of farms, including family
and nonfamily ownership
- Use of new production technologies and other management
practices
- Farm use of credit
- Farmers' participation in off-farm employment
- Characteristics of producers purchasing crop insurance
To meet the requirements of the Food, Agriculture, Conservation,
and Trade Act of 1990 and the Food Quality Protection
Act of 1996, NASS collects ARMS data on field crop chemical
use and publishes those data annually in Agricultural
Chemical Usage Field Crops Summary. ARMS data are
also the source for NASS's
Farm Production Expenditures, an annual summary of
U.S. and regional farm production expenditures.
ARMS production input data provide annual weights for
NASS's computation of the Prices Paid by Farmers Index,
used to calculate parity prices required by the 1933 Agricultural
Adjustment Act. Parity prices help regulate some 45 fruit,
vegetable, and nut Federal marketing orders. The indices
are also required by the 1978 Public Range Improvement
Act to calculate annual Federal grazing fees on the Nation's
western public lands by the Bureau of Land Management
and the Forest Service. Milk marketing boards also depend
on the price indices and expenditure data, which are also
used in USDA's measures of farm productivity. In addition,
ARMS contributes to other research as it provides the
basic cost-of-production
and supply response information on which other analyses
rely.
ARMS is the only source of national data to support research
on farmers' decisions to adopt new technologies and to
relate those decisions to the economic performance and
structural attributes of farms and farm families. Technology-adoption
decisions tracked in ARMS include the following:
- Choice of bio-engineered seed
- Selection of waste management practices by livestock
producers
- Use of chemical and biological pest management alternatives
- Use of information management technologies
- Use of precision technologies in crop production
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