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USDA’s NASS County Estimates Discontinuation
Yesterday, the USDA announced the discontinuation of their NASS County Estimates for Crops, effective immediately. The County Estimates for Crops are an important source of production, yield, and area across the agriculture industry. Losing this valuable source of data will impact business operations, decision making, database construction, and yield forecasting.
At Gro, we are well positioned to handle this type of data disruption and fill in the gaps. Our analyst and data science teams are already ingesting alternative data to enhance our machine learning forecast models. Gro currently offers its customers daily updating county-level yield forecast models for corn, wheat, and soybeans built on 20 years of NASS county yield history as the training set. Despite USDA’s discontinuation, Gro’s yield models will continue to produce estimates as a reliable source in the market. The robustness of Gro’s machine learning yield framework allows for seamless integration of new data and rapid testing of alternative forecasting models.
Gro's harmonization of data extends beyond yield forecasting, including fusion of remote sensing data. In 2022, after witnessing a series of other satellite data lapses, Gro’s research and development teams created a Gro Land Surface Temperature (Gro LST). Gro LST is a generative AI model that incorporates observations from multiple LST and air temperature sources and shares information across them. The result is an aggregated LST metric that can approximate daily temperature for all target geographies regardless of data availability from underlying sources. Gro LST is a key input to Gro’s suite of yield forecast models, preserving model performance during data disruptions or outages from other temperature sources.
Leveraging data to make smarter decisions increases our dependence on timely and accurate reporting. When data sets become unavailable due to satellite outages or the end to government reporting, Gro has worked to bridge the gap. In late 2018, a US government shutdown forced the USDA to skip the January 2019 WASDE report. Gro leveraged our extensive platform to issue full US & World supply & demand estimates for all major crops.
