58 – Leading the Dance with Dirty Data
Dancing with a New Partner: Imputing New Demographic Questions on the Census of Agriculture Using Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) Software
Darcy Miller
United States Department of Agriculture
The census of agriculture (COA) is the only source of uniform, comprehensive agricultural data for every state and county in the United States. The United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) conducts the COA every five years, in years ending in 2 and 7. In 2015, a panel of experts recommended that the COA update information collected about women and new or beginning farmers. Subsequently, NASS redesigned the demographics section of the 2017 COA. Some of the updates included allowing multiple principal operators and adding more than a dozen detailed farm operation decision-making questions to the 2017 COA. This major redesign to the questionnaire required changes/updates to downstream processes such as editing and imputation. We describe the changes made to the development of donor pool values for the new decision-making questions and updated methods for editing and imputation of some of the demographic variables.