Response to BEA Comments

June 11, 2008

TO: Dennis J. Fixler

Chief Statistician

Bureau of Economic Analysis

U.S. Department of Commerce

FROM: NASS Clearance Officer

U.S. Department of Agriculture

Room 5336A, Mail Stop 2024-S

1400 Independence Avenue

Washington, DC 20250-2024

RE: Notice of Intent to Seek Approval to Revise and Extend an Information Collection - 73 FR 11613; March 4, 2008; Docket No. 0535-0218.

Thank you for your response to the Federal Register Notice regarding the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS). USDA and NASS are committed to providing timely, accurate, and useful statistics in service to U.S. agriculture.

NASS, conducts the ARMS under a cooperative agreement with the USDA Economic Research Service. NASS is aware of Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) usage of aggregate results from the Cost and Returns Report version of the ARMS Phase III for various items as listed in the BEA response to the Federal Register notice. NASS is seeking continuation of these items in the extension request for OMB Docket No. 0535-0218. NASS intends to continue providing aggregated results of these data items at national level and also at State level in the 15 major States made available by the 2003 expansion of the ARMS program.

In addition, ARMS is used to produce estimates of sector-wide production expenditures and other components of income that are used in constructing the estimates of income and value-added that is transmitted to the U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, by the USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) for use in constructing economy-wide estimates of Gross Domestic Product. This transmittal of data, prepared using the ARMS, is undertaken to satisfy a 1956 agreement between the Office of Management and Budget and the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce that a single set of estimates be published on farm income. We are sensitive to the economic importance of these needs and will continue collection of the necessary data..

Once OMB has published the Information Collection Request (ICR) packet, it will be available for public comment for 30 days. The complete ICR packet will be available at:

http://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAMain.

NASS will keep BEA informed about any modifications that would affect the BEA’s use of the aggregated results on which it relies.