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Abstract:
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Agriculture has evolved from mule and plow into a high-tech business. Likewise, cutting-edge techniques to produce agricultural statistics used to guide agricultural policies have sprouted from the innovation of statisticians at the USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). Advanced remote sensing techniques that collect data without physical contact, more specifically, satellite imagery, have been the crux of the "Census by Satellite." The yield, a Cropland Data Layer, can be used in many geographical information systems. In addition, pioneering uses of data mining techniques have been applied to improve the quality of data from collection to estimation. With their ability to illustrate complex statistical results in an easily digested form, data mining and remote sensing are just a few of the areas where innovations in agricultural statistics are growing in NASS.
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