The Agriculture Department projected last July that farmers would harvest 86.8 million acres of corn in autumn. The projection was repeatedly revised upward until, in January, the department found 1.3 million more acres of corn — an area larger than Delaware — and concluded that the final amount harvested was 91.3 million acres.
“It was a miss. No other way to call it,” said Seth Meyer, who served as the department’s chief economist until leaving in December.
The 5 percent undercount may seem small, but it was the department’s worst projection in recent memory. It came as the Trump administration was cutting staff at the Agriculture Department and as President Trump’s trade war raised prices for equipment and hurt exports.
Some people in agriculture have become increasingly worried about the reliability of department data. That skepticism could lead to a breakdown of the historically close relationship between the department and farmers it serves, they said.
“U.S.D.A. always had a great relationship with its farmers,” said Mr. Meyer, who now leads the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri. “That seems to have weakened.”
The Agriculture Department publishes thousands of reports annually on everything from county-level sorghum planting to China’s hardwood market. But its estimates of crop size are some of the most closely read reports. Traders use information from the reports to immediately buy and sell commodities, affecting the prices that farmers receive for their crops. Farmers use the information to make decisions about how and when to try to sell their crop for the most money.
Department officials haven’t offered an official explanation for the miss, but many outside it point to staffing cuts and lower survey response rates.
The Agriculture Department lost 23,000 employees in 2025, as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency slashed jobs across the federal government. The National Agricultural Statistics Service, which produces crop reports, was one of the hardest-hit divisions; it lost 34 percent of its staff, going to about 500 employees from around 800.
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