Justification for Cold Storage Change Request

SUBJECT: Change Request, OMB No. 0535-0001

We are submitting this change request for the Cold Storage information collection, OMB Control Number 0535-0001, to address minor changes to the Monthly Cold Storage Report.

NASS was contacted by representatives of the Beef, Dairy, and Sheep industries to request changes to the data collected for their commodities on the cold storage report. These changes were needed to obtain a higher level of detail by breaking out some of the more general categories in each commodity.

Several food categories currently ask for aggregated totals with components listed as “includes”. At the industries’ request, these “includes” are now listed as subsets of the category. These include: cheddar cheese; other American types of cheese; mozzarella cheese; other Italian type cheeses; tart cherries concentrate; ground beef; other boneless beef; unclassified beef cuts; mutton; lamb leg, shoulder, middle meats, other bone-in lamb, ground lamb, and unclassified lamb.

The break-out of cheddar and mozzarella cheese were specifically requested by the dairy industry in order to bring the cold storage report in-line with the NASS Manufactured Dairy Report which currently publishes the production of these two subsets of cheese.

The primary request of the beef industry involves removing ground beef from the boneless beef category by making it a subset in order to distinguish boneless cut inventories from ground meat. Unclassified beef was added for consistency of commodity breakouts on the report which existed on all of the other meat commodities with the exception of beef.

Lamb and Mutton had been listed as one total item in the past. NASS has broken this category out into the major cuts of meat requested by the industry to better align the questionnaire with the industries information needs.

Also, several items have been dropped from the questionnaire. Questions related to fresh grapes, other fresh fruit, onions, other fresh vegetables, dairy cream, processed cheese, evaporated and condensed milk, dried and evaporated fruits, other nuts shelled, other nuts in shell, eggs shelled, canned meats in cooler, canned hams, all other canned meats, miscellaneous cooler stocks, and miscellaneous freezer stocks were removed from the questionnaire. These estimates on the cold storage report had been discontinued over time and the removal of these items should reduce overall respondent burden.