Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS): How is it used?

ARMS Briefing Room What is ARMS? What type of information is collected in the survey? How is it used? How are the results reported? How can I get access to the data?

ARMS is critical to the research and analysis mission of ERS and is a key input to developing agricultural statistics across USDA and other government agencies. It provides the information base for sector estimates of value added, income for farms by type of commodity specialization, costs of producing major crop and livestock commodities, indices of prices paid by farmers for production inputs, and an annual report on the status of family farms. ARMS supports USDA estimates of household income and wealth, and contributes to a variety of applied farm production, management, technology adoption, resource use, and household well-being research applications.

ARMS data on the economic activities of individual farm households aid policy analysis on how farmers cope with risk, adjust to policy shocks, and make decisions on labor and technology adoption. The data also enable researchers to carry out disaggregated analyses ranging from a group-wise estimate of financial well-being based on farm and/or household characteristics (e.g., the ERS farm typology) to behavioral hypothesis testing with unit-level data.