Non-substantive Change Request for Local Foods

Non-substantive Change Request

0535-0259 – Local Foods

In the initial submission to OMB for the creation of a new information request, several of the documents that were submitted were marked as Draft Versions. While OMB was conducting their review of the documents, NASS continued meeting with three other USDA agencies that have been very involved in the development of this new program to conduct a final review of the materials. Representatives from the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), Economic Research Service (ERS) and Rural Development (RD) asked to have one additional question added to the questionnaire as a result of this review.

In Section 6 Practices on page 13 of the questionnaire the following question has been added.

7. Was this operation a member of a cooperative in 2015? . . . . . . . 5042 1 Yes 3 No

With this being a new survey, AMS, ERS and RD all felt that this question would help them perform comparisons on the data from operations that had been members of a Farmer’s Co-Operative versus those who hadn’t.

In addition, this version of the questionnaire has been reformatted by the Census Bureau’s National Processing Center in Jeffersonville, Indiana. This final format assists in the highlighting of the skip patterns (reduce burden on respondents) as well as improving the data capture (by NASS), when the questionnaires are returned.

Final versions of the questionnaire instruction sheet along with the cover letters have also been loaded into the ROCIS – OMB submission system.