Agricultural Statistics is published each year to meet the diverse need for a reliable reference book on agricultural production, supplies, consumption, facilities, costs, and returns. Its tables of annual data cover a wide variety of facts in forms suited to most common use. The estimates for crops, livestock, and poultry made by the U.S. Department of Agriculture are prepared mainly to give timely current state and national totals and averages. They are based on data obtained by sample surveys of farmers and of people who do business with farmers. The survey data are supplemented by information from the Census of Agriculture taken every five years. Being estimates, they are subject to revision as more data become available from commercial or government sources. Unless otherwise indicated, the totals for the United States shown in the various tables on area, production, numbers, price, value, supplies, and disposition are based on official Department estimates. They exclude states for which no official estimates are compiled. Extensive data includes statistics for the following: -Grain and Feed -Cotton, Tobacco, Sugar Crops, and Honey -Oilseeds, Fats, and Oils -Vegetables and Melons -Hay, Seeds, and Minor Field Crops -Cattle, Hogs, and Sheep -Dairy and Poultry -Insurance, Credit & Cooperatives -Agricultural Conservation & Forestry -Consumption & Family Living -Fertilizers & Pesticides Miscellaneous Agricultural Statistics such as Foreign Agricultural Trade Statistics including exports, fisheries and more. Professionals in the following fields to include farmers, ranchers, soil conservationists, surveyors, agricultural economist consultants, livestock manufacturers, livestock feedlot operators, food distributors, animal scientists, food chemists, food brokers, farm and land appraisers (and more) may have the greatest interest in this volume.

"The challenges facing agriculture are plenty. Along with the world's growing population and diminishing amounts of water and arable land, the gradual increase in severe weather presents new challenges and imperatives for producing new, more resilient crops to feed a more crowded planet in the twenty-first century. Innovation has historically helped agriculture keep pace with earth's social, population, and ecological changes. In the last 50 years, mechanical, biological, and chemical innovations have more than doubled agricultural output while barely changing input quantities. The ample investment behind these innovations was available because of a high rate of return: a 2007 paper found that the median ROI in agriculture was 45 percent between 1965 and 2005. This landscape has changed. Today many of the world's wealthier countries have scaled back their share of GDP devoted to agricultural R&D amid evidence of diminishing returns. Universities, which have historically been a major source of agricultural innovation, increasingly depend on funding from industry rather than government to fund their research. As Upton Sinclair wrote of the effects industry influences, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." In this volume of the NBER Conference Report series, editor Petra Moser offers an empirical, applied-economic framework to the different elements of agricultural R&D, particularly as they relate to the shift from public to private funding. Individual chapters examine the sources of agricultural knowledge and investigate challenges for measuring the returns to the adoption of new agricultural technologies, examine knowledge spillovers from universities to agricultural innovation, and explore interactions between university engagement and scientific productivity. Additional analysis of agricultural venture capital point to it as an emerging and future source of resource in this essential domain"--

The new edition of this annual publication (previously published solely by IFOAM and FiBL) documents recent developments in global organic agriculture. It includes contributions from representatives of the organic sector from throughout the world and provides comprehensive organic farming statistics that cover surface area under organic management, numbers of farms and specific information about commodities and land use in organic systems. The book also contains information on the global market of the burgeoning organic sector, the latest developments in organic certification, standards and regulations, and insights into current status and emerging trends for organic agriculture by continent from the worlds foremost experts. For this edition, all statistical data and regional review chapters have been thoroughly updated. Completely new chapters on organic agriculture in the Pacific, on the International Task Force on Harmonization and Equivalence in Organic Agriculture and on organic aquaculture have been added. Published with IFOAM and FiBL