USDA NASS Quick Stats data exploration, a companion product for 'Implications of U.S. agricultural data practices for sustainable food systems research' published in Nature Food, Feb. 2023. doi:10.1038/s43016-023-00711-2.
Note: In this exploration, we utilize manual data query and download from the Quick Stats database to represent the most accessible option. We note that NASSs API provides data users with software-mediated access to the NASS servers, it effectively gatekeeps knowledge to researchers and data users with the coding expertise to query the interface. Over the past decade, four R packages have been built: rnassqs (2022), usdarnass (2019), rnass (2015), and tidyUSDA (2019) to assist users in accessing the API. Of these, none are endorsed or certified by NASS, and none arrive with use-vignettes (e.g., rnassqs, usdarnass, tidyUSDA) that assume their users are coding novices. For resources that take a user from the basics to full access, they must seek out more detailed materials (e.g., NC State Extension, 2021) from resources outside the USDA. Thus, we do not explore API-mediated data query and download in this document.
We believe in open data science and in making research more reproducible; if you run into issues with any of our code, or criticisms, please reach out to blschum on GitHub to fix/discuss them.