dMac716/usda-nass-quickstats-ca-production

USDA NASS QuickStats: California production and area (county and state pulls)

Two small CSV tables pulled from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) QuickStats API. Data class: P1 (public).

File	Rows	Content
nass_production.csv	1,307 data rows (1,308 lines with header)	California county-level census/survey production, area bearing, area harvested, by commodity and year
nass_state_production.csv	15 data rows	California state-level production total, one row per commodity, plus a derived value_tons column

Source

• Agency: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, QuickStats API (https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/api).
• Retrieval date (taken from file modification time, not from the API): nass_production.csv 2026-07-10 (01:00 PDT); nass_state_production.csv 2026-07-10 (09:14 PDT).
• Pulled by the dataset author with the author's own QuickStats API key. The key is not stored in either file.
• Scripts used: nass_fetch.py (county file, commit fc026d9) and nass_state_production.py (state file, commit 8b8d39a). Both are plain Python 3 standard library scripts.

County file query (nass_production.csv)

• agg_level_desc=COUNTY, state_alpha=CA (script default), year in 2022 and 2017 (script default, overridable by environment variable; these were the values in effect).
• Four source/statistic combinations per commodity and year: SURVEY/PRODUCTION, SURVEY/AREA HARVESTED, CENSUS/PRODUCTION, CENSUS/AREA BEARING.
• Commodity list requested: the 50 NASS commodity names derived from the author's crop list. Only 10 returned rows (see Limitations): ALMONDS, APPLES, APRICOTS, AVOCADOS, BARLEY, BLUEBERRIES, CANOLA, CHERRIES, COFFEE, CORN.
• Columns: commodity, state, county, year, statisticcat (our source/statistic label for the query combination), value, unit, data_item (NASS short_desc). The columns commodity and statisticcat are the query parameters the author used; the other columns map to NASS fields state_name, county_name, year, Value, unit_desc, short_desc.

State file query (nass_state_production.csv)

• agg_level_desc=STATE, state_alpha=CA, statisticcat_desc=PRODUCTION, first available year in the order 2023, 2022, 2021, SURVEY before CENSUS.
• Commodities requested (script default): APPLES, APRICOTS, AVOCADOS, CHERRIES, COFFEE, ALMONDS, WALNUTS, GRAPES, OLIVES, PEACHES, PLUMS, PEARS, STRAWBERRIES, ORANGES, LEMONS. All 15 returned one row.
• Per commodity, the script keeps the first numeric row after sorting that prefers a plain total over a "UTILIZED" breakdown. The data_item column says exactly which NASS series was kept.
• Columns: commodity, year, value, unit, value_tons, data_item.

Unmodified government data statement

All columns except value_tons are US government data from USDA NASS QuickStats, reproduced as returned by the API. No rows were removed, edited, reordered by hand, or imputed. No columns were removed from the author's pull. The only fields not carried over from the API response are the many other QuickStats fields (for example load_time, agg_level_desc, domaincat_desc, CV (%)) that the author's scripts never wrote to disk.

The county file's value strings are as NASS returned them, including leading whitespace in suppressed cells.

Derived column: value_tons (author-created, CC0-1.0)

value_tons in nass_state_production.csv is NOT a NASS figure. It is a unit conversion computed by the dataset author's script from the NASS value and unit: TONS is kept as is, LB is divided by 2000, CWT is multiplied by 100 and divided by 2000. (The script also has hand-coded citrus box weights for BOXES; no row in this file uses that path.) This derived column is released by the dataset author, dMac716, under CC0-1.0.

Everything else in both files is US government data from USDA NASS QuickStats; no copyright is claimed on it by the author, and the author does not assert any license over it.

Attribution and no-endorsement notice

Source: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Quick Stats. This dataset uses the NASS Quick Stats API but is not endorsed or certified by NASS or the USDA. NASS did not create, review, or approve this copy. NASS, USDA, and the US government are not responsible for any errors introduced by the dataset author's processing.

Known limitations

• Suppression cells kept as published: the county file has 340 cells with value (D) (321, withheld to avoid disclosing individual operations) or (Z) (19, less than half the unit shown). They are deliberately not back-filled.
• Incomplete commodity coverage in the county file: the author's run requested 50 commodities, but after CORN the QuickStats API began answering HTTP 403 (289 failed requests in the run log), so the other 40 commodities (including grapes, walnuts, tomatoes, olives, pistachios, citrus) are absent from this file. Absence does not mean NASS has no data.
• Counts and areas are mixed in one value column; always read unit and data_item (units present: ACRES, OPERATIONS, BU, TONS, LB).
• County file years are 2022 and 2017 only (census years plus survey rows for those years).
• State file mixes years (2023 for most, 2021 for COFFEE) and series (for example COFFEE is the organic series; WALNUTS and ORANGES are specific utilized/fresh-market series). Check data_item.
• Snapshot only: NASS may revise figures after the 2026-07-10 pull.

Privacy and security

Checked for PII, credentials, and infrastructure details: none found. Method: text search of both files for email-address characters, URLs, API-key and token strings, local file-system paths, and institutional-affiliation strings, all zero hits, and column review (all columns are agricultural statistics). Aggregate agricultural statistics only; no personal data.

Provenance integrity

MANIFEST.sha256 in this repository lists the sha256 of every file. The two CSV files are byte-for-byte copies of the author's pull outputs.

Author, citation, and release note

Author: dMac716 (Hugging Face handle).

Suggested citation: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Quick Stats (https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov), California production and area, retrieved 2026-07-10 by dMac716 and republished at huggingface.co/datasets/dMac716/usda-nass-quickstats-ca-production.

Public release on the Hugging Face Hub is irreversible in practice: once public, copies may be cached, forked, or mirrored and cannot be reliably recalled.