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I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I n~~~!3 ' I ^ '. _)" ~.~; VU~~ A lure. and cultivated summer fallow !/. land temporarily idled or diverted to pasture use, and land once cropped but still considered by the farm operator to be readily convertible back to crops). Over the years the Census of Agriculture has been the primary source of cropland data. The only other source of comprehensive nationwide data has been the Soil Conservation Service (SCS), which conducted the Conserva- tion Needs Inventories of 1958 and 1967, the 1975 Potential Cropland Study, and the 1977 National Resource Inventory. The basic difference between the two sources is that Census reports the farm operator's appraisal of land use and the SCS reports a professional agriculturalist's judgement based on examination of a sample plot or point. The main difference in results is where land is in a perennial grass and pastured. The farm ~perator may consider this a temporary diversion from cropland to pasture and report it as cropland pasture on his Census ques- tionnaire even though some years have elapsed since it was last tilled. The SCS conservationist, seeing no evidence of recent tillage, may judge the field to be permanent pasture. Thus, the SCS inventories have had con- sistently lower estimates of total cropland acreage--413 million in 1977 compared with the 1974 ESCS estimate of 465 million acres. The difference is largely land identified as cropland pasture in Census-based ESCS esti- mates and as permanent pasture in SCS estimates. 1/ Cultivated summer fallow is included as a land input for crop production in a given year on the assumption that many acres of harvested wheat require two years of tillage to get one crop. II-55