County-level crop area in the USA 1840-2017

Principal Investigator(s):  View help for Principal Investigator(s) Michael Crossley, University of Georgia

Version:  View help for Version V3

Name File Type Size Last Modified
AgChange.zip application/zip 11.4 MB 10/12/2020 07:21:AM

Project Citation: 

Crossley, Michael. County-level crop area in the USA 1840-2017. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2020-10-14. https://doi.org/10.3886/E115795V3

Project Description

Summary:  View help for Summary This dataset contains estimates of proportional area of 18 major crops for each county in the United States at roughly decadal time steps between 1840 and 2017, and was used for analyses of historical changes in crop area, diversity, and distribution published in:

Crossley, MS, KD Burke, SD Schoville, VC Radeloff. (2020). Recent collapse of crop belts and declining diversity of US agriculture since 1840. Global Change Biology (in press).

The original data used to curate this dataset was derived by Haines et al. (ICPSR 35206) from USDA Agricultural Census archives (https://www.nass.usda.gov/AgCensus/).

This dataset builds upon previous work in that crop values are georeferenced and rectified to match 2012 county boundaries, and several inconsistencies in the tabular-formatted data have been smoothed-over. In particular, smoothing included conversion of values of production (e.g. bushels, lbs, typical of 1840-1880 censuses) into values of area (using USDA NASS yield data), imputation of missing values for certain crop x county x year combinations, and correcting values for counties whose crop totals exceeded the possible land area.

Please contact the PI, Mike Crossley, with any questions or requests: [email protected]

Funding Sources:  View help for Funding Sources USDA NIFA AFRI ELI Predoctoral Fellowship (2018-67011-28058); NSF IGERT (1144752)

Scope of Project

Subject Terms:  View help for Subject Terms agriculture; crops
Geographic Coverage:  View help for Geographic Coverage Conterminous United States
Time Period(s):  View help for Time Period(s) 1840 – 2017
Data Type(s):  View help for Data Type(s) geographic information system (GIS) data

Methodology

Data Source:  View help for Data Source The original data used to curate this dataset was derived by Haines et al. (ICPSR 35206) from USDA Agricultural Census archives (https://www.nass.usda.gov/AgCensus/).
Geographic Unit:  View help for Geographic Unit County

Related Publications

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Published Versions

V3 [2020-10-14]

V2 [2020-10-12]

V1 [2020-10-12]

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DDI 2.5

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