For decades, American farmers and market analysts have set their watches by USDA’s monthly reports, and in recent years, they’ve questioned whether the numbers those reports produce actually reflect what’s happening in their fields. Now, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has tapped a farmer to fix it by modernizing how USDA collects and processes that field and crop data.
Kip Tom, the Indiana grower who went on to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture under the first Trump administration, has been given a new assignment and a tall task: modernize the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), the USDA agency responsible for the crop production, yield and acreage data that moves markets every season.
It’s a sprawling task, and Tom, who still calls himself a farmer first, after 50 years working ground at Tom Farms in Leesburg, Indiana, says he intends to move fast to act on. Instructed to focus on just corn and soybean reports by NASS, he says it could move to other crops, including tree nuts and other produce, in the years ahead.
Tom Tapped by Rollins to Lead USDA’s Modernization Effort
The assignment came directly from Secretary Rollins, whom Tom now reports to on this project. He said she gave him the task during a roundtable in her office roughly three weeks before this conversation, with members of the National Corn Growers Association’s Corn Congress, as well as other farmers, in the room.
Tom described the mood in that meeting, about 30 people around the table — as strikingly unified. “It was a common theme amongst everybody that they didn’t believe NASS reports, either the day before or the day after,” he said. “They had very little faith in the numbers that would come out of there.”
An economist from the corn growers association was especially direct, Tom recalled, telling the group that the economic data her organization had compiled simply wasn’t showing up in the official reports.
Since getting the assignment, Tom has been running what he calls “shark tank” sessions, which are pitch meetings with companies and organizations proposing data solutions, several times a week for the past three weeks. He’s already delivered a roughly 20-page proposal to Rollins identifying two or three organizations he’d like to begin working with immediately, some of which have told him they can start as early as August 1 and backdate data collection to July 1.
“I want to deliver it in Rollins and Trump speed,” Tom says. “There’s no sense in dragging this out. The technology’s there, let’s access them. Let’s start trialing them now in the background to understand where they rest compared to the NASS data. And then we’ll take it to the final number.”
“We Need to Make Sure NASS is the Gold Standard” in Reporting
Farmer frustration over the accuracy of reports has come into focus over the past year. Tom doesn’t put the blame on the employees currently running NASS. He says they don’t have sufficient tools to work with.
“There’s a lot of great people at NASS, but they don’t have the tools to really monitor our crops and see what the conditions are or predict yields,” Tom says.
That gap matters more than ever, he argues, because private companies and foreign competitors already have access to technology U.S. farmers don’t, including tasking satellites to estimate yields and trading ahead of American producers in global markets.
“There are private companies around the world that have access to technologies, whether they could be tasking satellites to understand what our yields are like and trade ahead of us into the marketplace,” Tom adds. “That’s a disadvantage to the American farmer.”
He compares it to the National Weather Service. Four or five decades ago, meteorologists collected temperature, barometric pressure and rainfall data by hand. Today it’s automated. He wants agriculture to get there too with passive, continuous data flowing off farms through satellites and equipment, rather than a farmer filling out a paper survey once a year.
“I think we got to get to the place in agriculture where we have passive data coming off farms, whether it’s by tasking these satellites, some that are, that have their own constellations up there. They can really predict yields at a very fine degree,” says Tom.
Why Tom Thinks the Current System is Breaking Down
The core problem, according to Tom, is farmer participation. Response rates on NASS surveys have fallen from around 80% two decades ago to somewhere between 25% and 40% today, depending on the report.
“That’s got to tell you we’ve got a problem here,” Tom says. “People don’t have the time for the reports. They’re not spending the amount of time they should have if they do complete them.”
He says the current collection method compounds the issue. Enumerators travel to farms with a clipboard and pencil, asking growers how many acres they planted and what they expect to yield, a process Tom says invites error. He recounted an incident from several years ago in which an enumerator was sent to collect a corn yield sample from what was actually a seed corn field, which typically yields far lower than commercial corn.
“I said, well, you know, that you’re using that as corn and it’s only kind of probably yield, maybe 75 to 100 bu. per acre. Why would you use that in your estimate to figure out what corn is yielding in our county, " Tom asks.
He also points to redundancy across agencies.
Farmers report acreage separately to USDA’s Risk Management Agency for crop insurance and to NASS for statistical purposes, often duplicating effort with no real benefit.
“Why are we reporting through all these different agencies or different departments or bureaus to get this information?” he asks. “We could have some savings for the taxpayer and farmers to make sure that we have this that doesn’t need to be coming from five sources.”
What Modernization Actually Looks Like
Tom’s plan leans heavily on satellite imagery and machine data, with farmer consent, layered together to narrow the gap between predicted and actual yields.
He describe one satellite technology, developed in defense applications, capable of imaging the entire globe daily at roughly twice the resolution of the Sentinel satellites NASS currently has access to through NASA. Other companies fly drones over crop-producing regions.
Combined with yield-monitor data from farm equipment, and shared voluntarily and under farmer control, Tom emphasized repeatedly that the goal is to continually correct satellite-based estimates against harvest reality.
“I think we’re going to continue to contract down that delta between what we perceive yield to be and what the reality is, because we’re taking that machine data and correcting it against the satellite imagery,” says Tom.
Tom, who spent 50 years farming before his ambassadorship, kept returning to his own background as the lens for the project, compared USDA’s modernization efforts to “Moneyball,” the book and film about using data to challenge conventional scouting wisdom in baseball.
“It’s how they use digital information to make decisions, as opposed to that person that [had] 50 years of engagement within the industry, and he was going from his intuition,” Tom says. “Nothing wrong with that; I still embrace [intuition]. But I learned something, and that is we got to be adaptive to change.”
He also connected the effort to a broader modernization push already underway at USDA under Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden, including a consolidation of farmer-facing IT systems, dubbed “One Farmer, One File,” that Tom said eliminated close to 2,000 contractors and roughly 500 separate platforms.
“There are still those systems functioning at USDA,” Tom said of some of the department’s older computer infrastructure. “It’s unbelievable.”
For Tom, the underlying message is less about any single technology and more about urgency and a willingness to act.
“I think the biggest challenge is there are probably going to be some people that will try to slow this down,” he says. “I’m not going to let someone say, no, we can’t do this... We’re going to deliver on it as fast as we can, but we’re going to make good choices along the way too.”
Will Once-a-Month USDA Reports Be a Thing of the Past?
The payoff, he thinks, could be more frequent reporting, potentially every two weeks instead of monthly, with turnaround times of a day or two after the data is collected, rather than the current lag. Currently, those reports are released monthly, and when it comes to crop conditions, those reports are issued weekly.
Tom was careful to note the effort currently covers only corn and soybeans, though wheat is likely to follow.
He points out NASS produces hundreds of reports beyond row crops, vegetable production in California’s Salinas Valley, dairy herd size, milk output, and Tom expects digital solutions to eventually extend to those as well, though the approach will vary by commodity.
He also floated potential applications for crop insurance.
Rather than an adjuster walking a hail-damaged field counting shot holes in leaves, Tom suggested satellite imagery could help estimate losses more precisely, a possible efficiency gain for the Risk Management Agency as well as NASS.
What Happens to Farmer Surveys and Enumerators?
Tom says if that shift away from manual surveys happens, it will be gradual, not a wholesale elimination of the current workforce.
“We’re not going to say, get rid of your enumerators,” he says noting that decision ultimately rests with the NASS undersecretary.
Hand yield checks, physically walking fields, husking ears, counting kernels, will continue too, the same way Farm Journal’s Pro Farmer Crop Tour does it.
“We can use that, but we don’t need to do as much as we used to in the past,” says Tom.
He also says any data pulled from individual farms must be aggregated and anonymized, not traceable to a specific operation.
“We don’t want to pick on any one farmer,” says Tom.
Farmers, he added, need to retain ownership and control over how their own data is used, a condition he described as central to winning grower buy-in, which he called “probably the biggest hurdle we had to cross.”
The Stakes: Competition Around the Globe
Tom says the modernization push comes down to one main point: it’s the only way the U.S. will stay competitive.
He’s less worried about whether other grain-producing nations publish good statistics of their own, although he mentioned Brazil as having a relatively robust system, and more concerned that opaque or non-transparent actors are quietly out-collecting the U.S.
“I’m more concerned about what if a COFCO in China all of a sudden, they have a report that’s much higher degree of accuracy than what ours is, and they can trade against the American farmer in the marketplace and put us at a disadvantage,” Tom says
He cited last year’s corn acreage swing as an example of the kind of surprise that unsettles markets and leaves farmers holding the wrong position.
“When that happens, that really disrupts the marketplace,” Tom says.
Timeline and Next Steps
Secretary Rollins has not given Tom a hard deadline, but Ton says he’s operating with urgency. The plan is to:
- Identify contractors
- Begin testing systems now
- And refine from there.
Publicly, the next phase is the round of listening sessions Rollins announced last week, which are planned to be held at state fairs and farm shows around the country. Tom sees the state fair setting as intentional.
“What better place to get together and celebrate a change that’s going to occur in the industry,” he says.
He’s asking farmers to show up with solutions, not just grievances. “We already know what the problems are,” Tom said. “Let’s move on. What are the solutions?”
Tom said he expects to have a finalized plan and system in place by the end of the year, and he’s inviting input directly, he gave out his email address (kiptom@tomfarms.com) on the record, asking farmers with ideas to reach out.
