The chair of the Agricultural Statistics Board says he’s uncertain if the USDA’s July Cattle Inventory report will return in 2025.
Lance Honig says the USDA is currently operating under a Continuing Resolution. “There are certain parameters that come along with that, and it’s not just that you can’t spend more money than last year,” he says. “There are also some provisions in there that say you have to do the same things you did last year, and so you can’t do things you didn’t do. You can’t stop doing things that you did last year. And so, we’re in kind of an awkward position right now.”
He stated it will ultimately depend on what is appropriated by Congress. “Our desire would be to do all the things that we do right,” he says. “Things like July cattle, some of the other county-level estimates, the cotton objective yield that we had to cut last year. You know we’re in the business of producing ag statistics, and so the more data we can provide the better.”
As for the loss of the July 2024 Cattle Inventory report, Honig says it all came down to timing. “If you look at when we finally received our appropriated budget for FY24 sometime in April, we’ve only got until September 30th to make everything balanced,” he says. “There are only so many programs we had left to choose from to absorb the savings that we needed to capture in order to only spend what we were appropriated.”
