Sen. Jerry Moran, along with Reps. Tracey Mann and Jim Costa led a congressional letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack requesting a reversal of the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service’s (USDA-NASS) recent decision to discontinue publication of the July cattle report and the county estimates for crops and livestock. The letter shows the strong bipartisan and bicameral support in Congress for continuing the reports.
The July cattle report is an important metric in estimating the 2024 calf crop and heifer retention, and the county estimates are immensely valuable for quantifying the damages from natural disasters such as recent wildfires in Texas and Oklahoma. Cutting these reports not only puts cattle producers who use them for marketing decisions at a disadvantage, but also goes against the stated mission of USDA-NASS to provide timely, accurate statistics to benefit the U.S. agriculture sector. NCBA was the first group to call on USDA to reverse this decision and will continue to work toward that end because discontinuing a handful of reports will not result in any of the substantive cost savings the department claims.