The Fort Wayne Farm Show was this past week and at the show there was a Grain Market Outlook pamphlet that was given out by Ford & Young Futures and Central States Enterprises. I was curious as to where the corn production data came from and finally tracked it down: the USDA Crop Production 2005 Summary.
Here's the thing, in verifying whether or not the Grain Market Outlook was drawn from the same data, I noticed that whomever produced the report is mixing and matching data in tables. That is, they are comparing apples to oranges and passing it all off as apples. I can't understand why these folks wouldn't check the data they're putting into papers such as this or (which I doubt) would intentially mislead the end users they were targetting. The errors are there, either way.
Page 3 of the Grain Market Outlook is entitled Final Corn Crop Production Numbers as of January 12, 2006 and goes on to list the 2004 and 2005 values for the Total US, Indiana, and Ohio in the following categories: Harvested Acres, Yield, and Production. For the Harvested Acres they used the data from the USDA Summary Corn: Area Planted for All Purposes and Harvested for Grain by State and United States, 2003-2005 table on page 4 which, as you might expect, shows data for both Area Planted for All Purposes and Area Harvested for Grain. Here's the rub: for the Total US and Ohio they are using the Area Harvested for Grain whereas for Indiana they are using Area Planted for All Purposes. Obviously this will inflate the Indiana numbers slightly compared to the others. On the same page of the Grain Market Outlook, they just plain get wrong the 2005 Total US Production value, which comes from page 5 of the USDA Summary.
I haven't yet checked the rest of the document, but that much alone encourages me to want to do my own homework when it comes to data from a third party.
