North Carolina Included in Broiler Production Survey this Spring

If broiler production is part of your operation, you may be getting a notice in the mail from the National Ag Statistics Service in the next couple of weeks. Joe Prusacki, Director of the statistics division for USDA’s NASS:

“What’s called our Agricultural Resource Management Study. We have one piece that’s focusing on broiler production this year.”

Prusacki says these in-depth surveys for various commodities and aspects of meat production occur only every five or six years. North Carolina is one of several states to be surveyed:

“There’s 17 states in this survey, and North Carolina is one of them and in North Carolina we have a sample size of right at about 200 broiler producers will be surveyed.”

Prusacki explains that it’s only broiler producers that will be surveyed:

“What we’re targeting are the actual growers of the broilers, the farmer out there, the producer out there that takes the time to go to their houses to check on their birds and that. Those are the people we’re surveying. And so we’ve got a sample that was drawn, and the 200 people in North Carolina will be getting a notice that says ‘hey, you were selected for this survey’, one of enumerators will be contacting you…that’s our data collectors, our enumerators, our data collectors, and they will set up a time with you…what works for you to fill out this form.”

Unlike many NASS surveys this will be an on-site survey according to Prusacki:

“Yes, these are going to be personal interviews, yeah. Because they’re kind of lengthy, and it gets into some in-depth questions and you may have to go back to your records to get some piece of information.”

And a producer may ask:

“What’s in it for me? Well, you have to think about the big, big, big, big picture, I mean I used to talk about from the 30,000 foot level looking down, decisions are made in this country at various levels, at state, at local and national level, and good decisions need good information. One thing to think about in the broiler industry is about 20% of the overall broiler production, they’re exported. So, this information will be used as we move forward, we may need to be negotiating trade arrangements with different countries. Okay, what are reasonable levels of income that producers are getting from the broiler industry, we don’t want to necessarily undersell what we’re producing like some other countries do. This information is also is used as policy is being made, agricultural policy or other sorts of policy being made in this country as we move forward. There’s all sorts of information that are gleaned out of this to make decisions for agriculture at the US and in North Carolina, as well.”

Prusacki goes on to say that while possibly an imposition, participating in the survey is important for all producers.