data

In our never-ending quest to satisfy the agricultural community’s and general public’s thirst for information, USDA Market News is collaborating with data.gov to add custom reports to our portal websites

USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) collects and publishes a high volume of market information for five major commodity areas.  With the addition of the custom reports feature, we are offering tools that will help farmers, ranchers, and businesses be able to manage, sort, and view our data in a more meaningful way. You can drill down and generate tailored historical reports that include only the data points you need and also download it in a variety of standard formats, like XML or plain text.

A new smartphone application, or “app,” is available as a free download for both iPhone and Android users to access soil survey information. The app, SoilWeb, combines online soil survey information with the GPS capabilities of smartphones.

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA's rich science and research portfolio.

With spring not that far away, the garden catalogues are starting to fly through the mail, but the “must read” of the moment for America’s estimated 80 million gardeners is the new Plant Hardiness Zone Map rolled out by USDA last week at www.planthardiness.ars.usda.gov.

With nearly 2 million page views in 2011 alone, the USDA National Farmers Market Directory is one of the Department of Agriculture’s most popular consumer search engines.

Cross posted from the Let's Move! blog:

Ensuring that Americans eat well and lead healthy lives is among our greatest goals at USDA.  First Lady Michelle Obama, of course, has taken an important role on this front – leading a national conversation and administration-wide effort.  As part of the Lets Move! initiative USDA is taking on the challenge of food deserts.  These nutritional wastelands exist across America in both urban and rural communities where parents and children simply do not have access to a supermarket.

Today, the Economic Research Service (ERS) posted a new and innovative interactive mapping tool that makes it easy to visualize and compare rural economic and social conditions among counties, states, and regions. By creating county-level maps of the United States,  users can see how socioeconomic conditions vary across the United States, or within a state.

As I write, the streets of D.C. are piled with snow, Federal government offices in the area are closed, and the city has come to a slip-sliding standstill.  Throughout the storm, my colleagues from USDA’s Economic Research Service have been working to get Your Food Environment Atlas up and running for the launch of First Lady Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity.