By Stephen Smoot
Starting on Dec 30 and extending through Jan 12, the National Agriculture Statistics Service of the United States Department of Agriculture will issue preliminary surveys to gather information about cattle, sheep, and goats.
The most recent “Mountain State Reporter” newsletter from NASS shared that “questionnaires will be mailed to producers in the sample on December 20, 2025; they can respond via mail or electronically.” Additionally “enumerators from the Eastern Mountain Region Office will collect data on cattle, sheep, and goat inventories.”
Questions for cattle farmers will cover topics such as milk and beef cow numbers, replacement heifers, steers, cattle on feed, milk production, and cash crop. Those raising sheep and goats can expect queries on breeding and market sheep and goat numbers, lamb and kid crops, 2025 wool and mohair production, and fatalities.
The Mountain State Reporter also included a QR code for photo submissions. NASS invites all West Virginia farmers to use the code and submit fun, scenic, interesting, or unusual, but appropriate, farm pictures for display in the NASS annual bulletin or one of its other publications.
Another survey may come to some at the end of January. At that point, many farmers will receive the full questionnaire for the Census of Agriculture, a report released every five years on the status of farming and related endeavors in the United States. The process opened in Jan 2024 with the “National Agricultural Classification Survey,” a questionnaire that seeks to “identify potential agriculture operations in the United States.”
The report will come out in 2027. It contains agricultural economic and business information not gathered by the United States Census Bureau and reported in its “County Business Patterns Data.”
The USDA uses different criteria to establish identified “agriculture operations,” or more plainly put, farms. Officially, a farm need not be of a certain size and the category includes everything from massive operations utilizing thousands of acres and generating millions in revenues to hobbyists with a small number of, or even no, acres and limited commercial application of them.
“A farm can also be a city rooftop used for honey production,” shared Shareefah Williams, USDA statistician for Delaware and Maryland. “The USDA defines a farm as any place where $1,000 worth of products will be sold, or normally sold, within any given year.”
This definition, established for the 1974 Census of Agriculture and after, also represents the sales threshold at which West Virginia agricultural producers can take advantage of certain property tax breaks.
Operations that meet the legal standard of an agricultural operation may receive the full Questionnaire.
In the 2022 Census of Agriculture, it was reported that Pendleton County had 4,134 cattle and calves, 131 sheep, lambs, and goats.