This collection includes county-level data from the United States Censuses of Agriculture for the years 1840 to 2012. The files provide data about the number, types, output, and prices of various agricultural products, as well as information on the amount, expenses, sales, values, and production of machinery. Most of the basic crop output data apply to the previous harvest year. Data collected also included the population and value of livestock, the number of animals slaughtered, and the size, type, and value of farms. Part 46 of this collection contains data from 1980 through 2010. Variables in part 46 include information such as the average value of farmland, number and value of buildings per acre, food services, resident population, composition of households, and unemployment rates.

This dataset contains estimates of proportional area of 18 major crops for each county in the United States at roughly decadal time steps between 1840 and 2017, and was used for analyses of historical changes in crop area, diversity, and distribution published in:Crossley, MS, KD Burke, SD Schoville, VC Radeloff. (2020). Recent collapse of crop belts and declining diversity of US agriculture since 1840. Global Change Biology (in press).The original data used to curate this dataset was derived by Haines et al. (ICPSR 35206) from USDA Agricultural Census archives (https://www.nass.usda.gov/AgCensus/). This dataset builds upon previous work in that crop values are georeferenced and rectified to match 2012 county boundaries, and several inconsistencies in the tabular-formatted data have been smoothed-over. In particular, smoothing included conversion of values of production (e.g. bushels, lbs, typical of 1840-1880 censuses) into values of area (using USDA NASS yield data), imputation of missing values for certain crop x county x year combinations, and correcting values for counties whose crop totals exceeded the possible land area.Please contact the PI, Mike Crossley, with any questions or requests: mcrossley3@gmail.com