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Have you ever wondered how American farmers and businesses track the price of their commodities?  Today, farmers, ranchers, and the entire agricultural supply chain turn to USDA Market News – administered by my agency, the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) – for timely, reliable, unbiased data that serves as the information lifeline for America’s agricultural economy.

But 100 years ago, everyone was in the dark about how much things cost.  That’s why, in 1915, the first USDA Market News report was sent by telegraph, letting buyers and sellers across the country know the price of strawberries in Hammond, Louisiana.

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 USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

American consumers are enjoying increasingly more opportunities to buy food directly from farmers and to patronize grocery stores and restaurants that offer local foods. Policymakers have taken notice, and as part of Congress’s FY14 Appropriations Bill, the House Agriculture Committee asked the Economic Research Service (ERS) to report on the scope of local and regional food systems and recent national trends. The result - Trends in U.S. Local and Regional Food Systems: Report to Congress - details the latest economic information on local food producers and consumers, and reviews policies supporting local food systems.

The ERS report poses questions like how rapidly direct-to-consumer farm sales are growing, some characteristics of local-food farms, and the level of organic farm participation in local food sales. It addresses consumer issues such as willingness to pay premium prices for some local foods, and how local food prices compare with those at retail outlets.

The Livestock Mandatory Price Reporting (LMR) Program was established to expand pricing information available in the livestock industry. Part of USDA Market News data, the information is distributed by the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) and allows analysts to dive in head first and fulfill all of their number crunching ambitions.

The purpose of the program is to provide marketing information for cattle, swine, lamb, and livestock products that can be readily understood and utilized by producers. Livestock Mandatory Reporting encourages competition in the marketplace by vastly improving price and supply data, bringing transparency, breadth and depth to market reporting. The program gets its authority through the Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act of 1999, which must be reauthorized by Congress every five years. The program is up for reauthorization in September 2015.

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 USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

Describing the structure of the U.S. farm sector is challenging, because farms vary widely in size and other characteristics.  Are they largely family businesses, or corporate operations?  U.S. farms range from very small retirement and residential holdings to businesses with sales in the millions of dollars. And descriptions based on U.S. averages hide much of the variation.

The Economic Research Service prepares periodic reports on family farms that provide detailed information for policy makers and others interested in farm policy and the farm sector.  The reports draw on data from a scientifically designed USDA survey, the Agricultural Resource Management Survey, or ARMS.  The survey, conducted annually, covers all types of farms, and is designed to accurately represent farms and farm households, including financial conditions and production practices.

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 USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

In the recession of 2007-09 and its aftermath, some areas of the United States fared better than others. In rural America as a whole, the pace of economic recovery has been slow, with attendant impacts on rural residents. Each year, USDA’s Economic Research Service provides a snapshot of the rural economy in a brief report, Rural America at a Glance.

The 2014 report shows that in several major respects, recent trends in rural America parallel those in the Nation generally.

Less than 2 years ago, the USDA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched the U.S. Food Waste Challenge, with the goal of reducing food waste in the United States.  We set an ambitious goal of having at least 400 businesses, schools, and/or organizations join the challenge by letting us know what they are doing to reduce food waste in their operations.  USDA also committed to finding ways in which its 33 agencies and offices could help reduce food waste through policy, partnerships, and research.

As of today, we have surpassed our membership goal by signing up 1,313 participants in the U.S. Food Waste Challenge.

The number and diversity of participants joining the challenge are indicative of a growing movement to reduce food waste that is spreading across the country.

November and December are traditionally times of celebration of various holidays in America, religious and secular.  This is a time for enjoyment and fellowship in the company of family, friends, and neighbors.  The celebrations almost always include gathering at dinner tables over feasts of the bounty our farmers provide.

Unfortunately, this is also a time when, after the celebration and feasting are done, a significant proportion of the leftover edible food is tossed in the trashcan or put down the disposal.  Much of this food ultimately ends up in landfills.

The Economic Research Service estimates that over 130 billion pounds of edible food goes uneaten per year at the retail and consumer levels in the United States, equating to over 1,200 calories per day per man, woman, and child.  On average, this suggests that as a nation almost one-third of the edible food that could meet our caloric needs goes uneaten.

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 USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

You may be surprised by the answers you get when you ask a group of middle schoolers, “What do you like about science?”

Recently, 30 twelve and thirteen year-olds from the Coleman and TL Weston Middle schools in Greenville, Mississippi summed up their answers up with one brief sentence: “I like learning new things about the world around me.”

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 USDA’s rich science and research portfolio.

Time is a limited resource. Deciding on how to utilize each minute in your 24-hour day is crucial.  However, the choice between using a portion of the day for food shopping, cooking, and cleaning up versus grabbing a fast food meal can have implications for our health and diet quality as well as other aspects of well-being. While fast-food purchases may save time, they have been linked to Americans’ poor diet quality and expanding waistlines.

Time-use patterns may provide clues as to what motivates fast-food purchases and in this way may help inform policies and other initiatives aimed at improving Americans’ diet quality.  Recently, we used time-use diaries from a nationally representative survey to examine how the time-use decisions of those who purchase fast food on a given day differ from the average of the U.S. population.

14.3% of American households found it difficult to put food on the table at some time in 2013, yet 31% of food at the consumer and retail level goes uneaten (USDA ERS).  Of the estimated 133 billion pounds of food that goes uneaten every year, much of it is perfectly safe and nutritious and could have been donated to hunger relief organizations to feed hungry people.  Sadly, much of this perfectly good food ends up in landfills.

How can we change this situation? Many managers at farms, food processors, supermarkets, dining facilities, and restaurants say they are worried about donating wholesome unsold food because of fear of liability.  Some say they don’t have the proper food safety processes in place to handle food recovery and donation programs.