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82 – Contributed Poster Presentations: Government Statistics Section
Dancing Distributions: Developing a Better Understanding of County-Level Crop Yield from Posterior Summaries
Nathan B. Cruze
National Agricultural Statistics Service
The United States Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (USDA NASS) publishes annual end-of-season estimates of crop yields for a wide variety of commodity crops at the county level. These crop yields have been important determinants of payments allotted to farmers under a variety of USDA agricultural support programs. NASS is transitioning county estimates for more than a dozen commodity crops to a model-based approach. Building on Bayesian sub-area models for crop yield (Erciulescu et al., 2018) applied to Illinois corn, this poster presentation examines relevant factors of crop yield and useful posterior summaries for assessing official county-level yields from 2011-2019.