USDA Blog

The horse racing community and most Kentuckians may be champing at the bit to hear the pounding of the hooves the first Saturday in May, but here at the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), we’re focusing on counting all those horses and measuring the value of equine production and sales...

“It felt a little buzzy,” said Lily Meritt, 7, a Daisy Girl Scout from Montgomery County, Maryland. She watched hungry mosquitoes through a plexiglass container as a USDA research scientist talked about pests that love to bug people. Lily and other D.C.-area Girl Scouts visited USDA headquarters to...

Since the 1980s, the number of very large crop farms with at least 2,000 acres of cropland has nearly doubled while midsize farms (100 to 999 acres of cropland) fell by nearly half as U.S. cropland has consolidated on fewer, larger farms.

Sometimes, to make a difference, you just have to take matters into your own hands. That’s exactly what 4-H’er Mackenzie Hinson did in Mount Olive, North Carolina. As a result, thousands of area residents worry less about finding healthy food to eat.

With a name like Fhb1, this particular gene is unlikely to ever become a household name. But it has the potential to combat a fungal disease that has been plaguing wheat farmers for years. Wheat scab can cripple a farmer’s yield and cost millions of dollars in crop losses.

Have you ever wondered how new looking and different tasting types of apples or tomatoes come to be? Improvements in taste, size, and color are often the result of years of research and plant breeding efforts. Many times, plant breeders search for traits in older varieties of plants to create new...

The mission of USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) is to anticipate trends and emerging issues in agriculture, food and rural America and produces objective economic research to inform and enhance public and private decision making. Among its research activities, ERS is conducting research on the...