Today is Thursday May 26, 2016.
I'm interviewing Joe Reilly,
the Administrator for the National Agricultural
Statistics Service or NASS.
I am Susan Fugate, I'm head of Special
Collections at USDA's National Agricultural
Library and have been an employee of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture for over 39 years.
We're in the studios of USDA's Creative Media and
Broadcast Center in Washington D.C.
Joe, would you state your name and spell your first
and last name please?
Yes, thank you, my name is Joe Reilly.
That's J-O-E-R-E-I-L-L-Y.
Good, I'd like you to start with giving us a
brief biographical sketch of your life and your work.
Okay, well, originally I'm from Pennsylvania.
I grew up on a very small farm up in the
northeastern part of Pennsylvania, up around
Tamaqua, if anybody knows where that is.
I attended Penn State University and from
graduation from Penn State University, started off my
career, I worked in Florida for a year or so
for a large banking financial system down
there and then began my federal career back in
1975 with the United State Bureau of the Census.
I've worked with the Bureau of the Census for
22 years and was heading up the Census of
Agriculture Program at the Bureau of the Census at
the time of its transition from the Department of
Commerce Bureau of the Census over to USDA to the
National Agricultural Statistics Service.
And I've worked in various positions of leadership at
NASS during that time.
I was over field operations for several
years, served as the Associate Administrator of
NASS for several years and for the last two years
have served as the Administrator.
Thank you.
Please tell us how you came to be appointed as
the Administrator of NASS?
Well, when you look back some of it is good old
fashioned hard work and some of it is being in the
right place at the right time.
I really credit a lot of my preparation of being
able to be selected as the Administrator of having to
deal with the Census of Agriculture.
I was heading up that program over at the
Department of Commerce Bureau of the Census.
As you know, the Census is the largest data
collection program involving agricultural
statistics in our nation and back in 1996 heading
up that program came up with a proposal to change
the definition of what a farm was.
And the current definition of a farm is any place
that produces or sells $1,000
of agricultural products during the course
of the given year.
And initiated a Federal Register Notice that
talked about changing that definition from $1,000
to $10,000 and at that time that would
have eliminated about half of the farms in our
country.
And so that started the political process and work
of looking at the impact of that and it was kind of
an interesting part of looking at where certain
programs should be and how they best serve their
clients but it really had a direct impact to
agriculture of maintaining the current definition of
a farm.
And at that time, Senator Byrd was very active and
did not want to look at eliminating 85% of the
farms in the state of West Virginia and was very
influential on appropriations committee
and in about a month's time, the program was
transferred out of the Department of Commerce
Bureau of the Census over to USDA NASS and that was
back in 1996, 1997.
And I think of heading that program and sort of
integrating it into NASS and seeing how
fundamentally it became the core of developing the
list of farm business operations across the
country and seeing how it's used to develop all
of the sampling frames that are used to do
whatever survey that NASS does, put me in a great
position to understand the statistical side and I was
able to bring in sort of an experience from another
statistical agency to make sure that it was properly
integrated into the programs here at USDA.
And I think sort of being at the right place at the
right time and having a leadership role in that
enabled me to get the right skills and abilities
so that when the previous Administrator Dr. Cynthia
Clark left, you know, two years ago I was in a key
position to move up because I have been in
various leadership positions for the last 20 years.
Share with us some of the challenging issues you
faced as Administrator and other leadership roles in
NASS and talk about some of your strategies for
moving NASS forward.
Well I think over the last,
starting back in about 2008,
one of the things that NASS, as many other federal
agencies had to deal with, was sort of constricting
or flat budgets.
Just recently, last week we got our 2017 fiscal
mark from the Senate and if I look at that dollar amount
for the expected appropriations for the
Agency, we are about at the same dollar level that we
were back in 2008.
So now you have the task of figuring out how to
deliver the same programs, the same statistical data
that the country relies on at the same budget for
about the last eight years.
So we had to do a very detailed respective search
of how could we find efficiencies?
And I think the biggest thing that we looked at is
that NASS at that time, basically,
had an office and a staff in each one of the 50
states across the country and looking at the
infrastructure of supporting that and then
looking at how we could integrate new technologies
that did not exist before to see if we could change
that fundamental structure.
So we started back in 2010 on the endeavor of, okay,
we have to make the tough call.
We have to move from basically 50 offices and
we're going to a regional approach.
And so we had to look at which offices we were
going to, and I'll use the word "close" because,
you know, you could say whatever it is but we were
closing offices and moving staff and we had to
identify which offices and what the regional
configuration was going to be.
So that required us not only,
I had to go out and meet with each one of the
Directors, Secretaries or Commission of Agriculture
from each one of the states,
talk about what we were doing,
negotiate with them as to what we saw was our
proposed plan of doing this restructuring and we
completed that and it was kind of an interesting
thing because you could talk a nexus of a couple
things coming together at the same time like a
perfect storm but the time that we were to implement
the restructure and move all the people around was
October 1, 2013 which is at the same time we went
through this several week government shut down.
So we had people who were literally supposed to move
and be in their new location the beginning of
that fiscal year and at the same time the
government was shut down.
So it was kind of an interesting time of
working through the people part of it.
There was people that were on,
their household goods were on moving trucks,
they didn't know where they were supposed to
report, what to do, there was no communication here.
So even though, at that time we weren't supposed to, I
was very active at home on the cell phones with a lot
of people trying to get them through this process.
So we had to change our structure.
So we went from an agency of about 1,100 people.
We are currently down to around 930 and that has
enabled us to operate and deliver our same
statistical program more effectively.
Now we also had to incorporate some new
technology.
One thing is instead of doing things 50 different
ways, you know, and all the inefficiencies doing
that we're trying to standardize things.
I'd like to tell you that we're doing them one way,
but at least we're down to at least 12 different ways
so that added a lot of efficiencies to the process.
So when you develop a questionnaire you want to
do something you didn't have a separate procedure
for how you were measuring something in Indiana
versus Iowa, versus Texas, we're now doing things in
a more standard fashion.
And I think one of the biggest changes we were
able to make was the introduction of iPads, or,
you know, the small tablet devices into our data
collection activities.
So we have around 2,500 field enumerators that go
around to all the farmers and ranchers on an ongoing
basis and they used to come out with paper
questionnaires, ask you all kind of questions that
had to go back to a central site to be keyed
in and process that.
Well right now we are capturing all that
electronically using iPads at the point of interview.
So we've eliminated printing,
paper questionnaires, mailing paper
questionnaires, we've reduced the time for a lot
of the data collection, we've improved the quality
of the data and that probably,
efficiency has enabled us to continue to produce our
statistical data requirements even with the
reduction of staff.
So that was probably our biggest challenge of
trying to figure out how we were going to deal with
this sort of level budget.
Now these efficiencies only take you so far and I
look ahead in the future in trying to figure out
where we would go from here.
We've been able to keep up with things but,
and still, one point in time I will say that the
business of gathering information and gathering
data is getting more complex and more costly each year.
So something we'll have to look at changing in the
future if we are going to be able to fulfill our
mission with sort of equal or less resources than we
have right now.
Talk about a program or a project that taught you
something you did not expect and share some
details with us.
Okay, well it's kind of interesting in working
with agriculture and especially with the
National Agricultural Statistic Service.
I've been with the Agency now 20 years.
As you know, we provide key information on how much
corn is grown in the country, cattle,
everything that allows the economic system to work
properly and we're used a lot to determine whether
people can get crop insurance payments or
commodity risk coverage payments and things like
that but looking at how agriculture has changed
and I've used this story quite a bit over the last
couple of years is that everybody still thinks
that agriculture as corn, soybeans, cattle,
hogs and in growing up in our organization if you
wanted to get ahead you wanted to be the
statistician that focused on corn,
that focused on cattle or focused on soybeans.
Well interestingly enough over the last couple of
years, one of the major issues facing our country
is what is happening to the bees that are out
there needed for pollination and if you
start looking at things and you may think being
able to measure corn production or count cattle
or hogs is a difficult task and I say this,
you know, I laugh to myself most of the time.
Try counting bees, okay?
That is a task in itself.
We had to get new groups of people together.
It's interesting that bees and how they're used in
pollination, they move all around the country.
They are in convoys of tractor trailers that move
all around the country and trying to figure out how
to count them, measure them,
know where they are at a given time because without
bees we won't have food in the future.
And we started this program about two years
ago and I look back on my growing up on a farm in
Pennsylvania and all the time I've spent in dealing
with agriculture and it's like,
I'm now learning about bees and how they work.
It's something I never thought growing up on a
small farm that I'd ever deal with or how important
that they are, and why I bring that up as a story
is that agriculture continually changes.
Things that we are dealing with now are new,
they're interesting and they're important and
shows how complex our system is for producing
the food in agri, and fiber in this country is
and just working on this project for the last
couple of years I'm dealing with things now
that I never even knew about a couple years ago
and I find that very exhilarating and
challenging and our staff really likes getting
involved in new activities like that.
Now the next thing coming up is looking at microbes.
We have programs on antimicrobial resistance
and how they're going to measure and that will be a
challenge that we'll be looking at measuring in
the next couple years.
Great, Dr. Catherine Woteki, Under Secretary for
Research Education and Economics often explains
in her public statements that having a statistical
service with the U.S. Department of Agriculture
is an important element in making sound policy
decisions based on reliable data.
Will you tell us details of a specific time or two
that illustrates NASS's role in policy decisions?
Well I think every month I can illustrate the role.
We put out a monthly crop report that measures how
much corn, soybeans and that is being produced in
this country.
We do that under lock up conditions.
If you ever have the opportunity, our staff
comes in, in the middle of the night.
We literally lock them up, you know,
we close them in an office.
We seal the windows, we seal the doors,
we cut off the telephones, we cut off the computer
systems and we look at measuring what is going to
be available in the food supply for the coming
season or cycle and it directly impacts the market.
Everything is driven off of it.
It sets the price of corn and soybeans, cattle,
depending on what we're putting out at that time.
And what is exciting about many of our young
statisticians that come in for work is that they
realize almost right away the importance of what
their job is because if they don't do their job
correctly and accurately they see the direct impact
back to the farmer.
Looking at just a big change that has come to
our organization that has occurred just since the
2014 Farm Bill that was put in place which
introduced the Agricultural Risk Coverage
Program and the Price Loss Coverage Program.
These are two safety net programs that are out
there to farmers that in case of a catastrophic
event, it could be a flood, could be, you know,
drought, the opposite end of it, hurricane,
things like that, they lose their crop or for
that particular year.
How should they be compensated?
Also it helps them to protect themselves by
price loss or revenue loss because of market
fluctuations.
So this is looking at providing, this type of
coverage to all the farmers and ranchers out
there and we now at NASS, are looking at providing,
I'll call them County Level Estimates.
There's 3,100 counties roughly around the
country, there's about 30 different commodities that
are in this program and based on the work that we
do on an annual basis, we have to be able to measure
the production and yield for those commodities,
county by county, across the country so that if the
farmer wants to go and apply for some type of
relief or loss coverage payment, they have to
compare themselves to the data that is reflective of
the average of the production in that
particular county.
And so all of our staff now see directly of how this
impacts farmers and ranchers out there because
if they've had a drought and need to get some type
of relief or a payment, they have to use our data to
show how they were impacted.
So instead of having a system that was based on,
well, when you have an event, everything is a
disaster, everything is lost, we now have
scientific or sound statistical data to be
able to prove and to document what really the
farmer or rancher has lost in a particular situation
and all of our staff are very involved in that
program and it really illustrates the key work
that we do and how the cycle of collecting the
data from the farmer of what they report to us,
us using good sound methodology and bringing
it all together, producing these numbers for each
county so that at the end of the year if a farmer
needs to apply for some type of program, they have
the data to be able to document their loss.
In 1997, you were awarded the Department of
Commerce's highest honor for your work on the
Census of Agriculture.
The Census is a very important part of your
legacy in all of your positions at NASS.
Can you, you described it to some level of detail
but can you describe the Census and how it has
changed and grown over the years and what you'd like
to see in the future?
Well, the Census of Agriculture, as I talked
about a little bit earlier, is the largest data
collection activity dealing with agriculture
that we do in this country.
Literally every five years,
those ending in 2 and 7, we try to measure and
document what's going on each farm and ranch across
the country of which there is about 2.1 million farms
now.
And why it's important and why I've enjoyed dealing
with it and it shows a little bit of the
evolution of our country and our statistical system
is that when I was back at the Department of Commerce
Bureau of the Census and I was dealing with the
Census of Agriculture, the Census
we were in with all the other areas of the economy.
So I was in a section, I was over Agriculture but
there was another division that was over
manufacturing, there was another division that was
over construction industries,
the service industries, things like that which
develop all of our GDP figures for the country.
Agriculture represents only about one and a half
or 2% of our GDP and you think, well geez,
in a generalize statistical agency, the
other 98% of the programs got a lot of the attention.
And when we looked at, as I told you before,
of looking at changing the farm definition from
the 1,000 level to the 10,000
level, it was in an effort of trying to sort
of save data collection costs but it didn't really
take into account how critical it was for
administering all of the programs that exist within
the Department of Agriculture.
So I actually think it was a fantastic move of moving
the Census of Agriculture out of the Bureau of the
Census into the Department of Agriculture.
90% of the work that I've been able to do over the
last 20 years is providing data that supports the
Farm Service Agency or the Risk Management Agency or
the Agricultural Marketing Service.
All the agencies and programs within USDA and
you work closer there to making sure that what data
is needed to support these things we can collect,
we can provide it in a timely fashion and the
Census allows us to have that framework so that if
the Secretary or we want to study something new
like, as I said before, what is happening to the
bees, it allows me from the Census of Agriculture to
know who are all the people who have bees in
the country which is a very small population.
So then we can focus our data collection and our
survey needs right to those individuals.
And since we moved the Census of Agriculture over
to Department of Agriculture, it has become
the foundation for what we do.
We do five year census, it becomes our benchmark of
accounting for all the land in the country.
We know what farmer or rancher is involved in what type
of production type activity so that if we
need to in any of the interim years go back and
study like oh, which farms are producing on-farm
energy like windmills or methane digesters, we know
which farms reported that in the census and can go
back just to those specific farms to gather
more detailed information and we use that census and
we use the foundation of that to be able to support
all the programs that USDA requires during that
interim five year timeframe.
And so I think it has been a fantastic move of
integrating the two programs together.
You shared a little bit with us about your
experience growing up on a small farm.
Can you talk about, a little more about that and
how that influenced your career and did anything in
particular tweak the young Joe Reilly's interest in
agricultural statistics?
Well, I tell this story all the time.
Growing up on the small farm, I learned very early
in my life that that's not what I wanted to do for
the rest of my life.
It did give me appreciation for what's
involved in agriculture but it's something that I
did not want to continue in but I always was
interested in it because that's where my family
came from and that's what, you know,
we always had roots in that area.
So that, and what I like about working for the
National Agricultural Statistic Service and the
name sort of tells it.
It is that first of all agriculture is very
prevalent in the name and it's before statistics.
Our first mission is to serve agriculture and
almost everybody in my agency right now, they all
grew up on farms, 90% of our staff,
that's where we all started.
Now we're not farmers now but we all have that
appreciation and love for what was involved in
dealing with agriculture.
And then you use your mathematical or
statistical skills in providing good quality
data back in the service of agriculture.
As I mentioned earlier, I started my career back at
the Bureau of the Census and during the course of
my career I worked on providing data on the
unemployment rate, on manufacturing statistics,
crime statistics, health statistics,
population statistics and all that is fine because I
used my mathematical and statistical skills that I
developed through college and all that but it wasn't
until the time that I was able to marry the two
together and really look at how I could use the
skills that I had developed statistically
and see how they actually provide some service back
to the agricultural community because that's
where I think myself and if you were to interview
many of the staff members that work in NASS I think
that's where, why all of us are so passionate about
what we do because we know directly how our data is
important to the farmers.
If you want to buy land, you have to have good
financial information to show the financial
profitability of your farm operation.
A lot of them will use data that we've provided
to show how they compare or contrast to other
typical entities that are in their same sort of
market niche.
You see how our information supports the
Crop Insurance Program which is critical to this country.
So if you didn't have the data to support a good
active crop insurance program what would happen
to people in times of disaster as I talked about before.
We keep a fair and open market in place.
Farmers now understand they're not just relying
like well, what should I sell a bushel of corn for?
By having a sound economic system in place, everybody
knows what the production is going to be and what
the price should be and it's fair and open to
everybody else.
And then we're starting to look at the trends.
I mean we study things now on conservation,
of how to keep things sustainable in the future
and farmers are using their information to see
what different practices are across the country.
As you know we were talking a little earlier
before we started this interview about the look
of certain practices such as with cover crops and
using no till and things like that and more and
more we're seeing that adoption rate of farmers
across the country.
And again, everybody looks for data to support that
whatever business decision or farming decision they
made it's practical and the more that they say
okay, here's how many farms are using this kind
of conservation practice and look at how
economically viable they are.
Why don't I look at the same thing and look at the
cost impacts that this has and that's where our data
really helps supporting agriculture.
So when you look at it in my career, it wasn't until
I could really blend the mathematical statistical
side to really seeing how it serviced agriculture
and I think, you know, I think within the
Department of Agriculture we're lucky in that
respect that we see the direct link of the data
that we produce and how farmers and the American
public really rely on it.
Well as we conclude this interview, are there any
other programs, decisions, experiences you'd like to
share with us?
Well, a couple of things and there are a couple of
issues that I'm dealing with now that are very
fundamental for the future of statistics in general
and especially agriculture statistics.
One is that we rely on the voluntary cooperation of
the farmers and ranchers out there to provide us data.
Our response rates and our cooperation continues to
decline.
I think it's part of society as a whole.
We're all busy, we're all busy doing a lot of things.
I think there is a tremendous veracious
appetite for data, people want more and more and yet
the number of farms continues to shrink a
little bit so we're putting a tremendous
burden back on the farmers out there to continue to
provide this data.
And I think that one of the challenges for NASS
and my agency is to look ahead in the future of how
can we, you know, satisfy that appetite for data
that is necessary and not over burden the farmers
and ranchers with the surveys that we're doing
out there?
We have to come up with new technologies,
new ways.
It's going to be exciting.
Just to give you one example.
You know one of our primary ways that we've
been able to collect data efficiently is that I
would call you up on the phone and ask you a few
questions.
Well how many people answer the phone now if
they don't recognize the name and number that
appears on the phone?
That didn't even exist a few years ago, you know?
So now we're faced with the difficulty of data
collection just dealing with this new mobile
government that and society that we have that
we have to figure out ways of looking at that.
So we're looking at new and exciting things.
We use satellite imagery quite extensively to see
if we can measure the production of crops
and things like that.
That helps for crops quite a bit.
It doesn't help as much for chickens that are in
a poultry house or things like that.
You still have to be able to get inside to figure
out how many are there.
So we have a challenge of figuring out how to
satisfy the data needs in the future without
burdening our farmers and ranchers and how to
provide quality data if we are experiencing some
diminishing response rates.
The other thing that is a major concern for us in
the future is being able to provide the data
security and integrity of protecting the data once
we collect it.
We're all dealing with cybersecurity threats,
things like that but yet we have a pledge to
maintain the privacy and confidentiality of the
farmers and ranchers of who provides us the data.
We have one issue now that we're dealing with that is
of great concern to me as I leave my career here at
NASS and that is that in the Appropriations Bill
last year, they passed the Cybersecurity Enhancement
Act of 2015 which now, for the first time,
allows the Department of Homeland Security to have
access to some of the confidential data that
NASS has collected from its farmers and ranchers.
All in the interest of national security and
being able to protect yourself from
cybersecurity threats but the perception of how the
American farmer and rancher are going to think
I've given you a pledge for the last 100 years
since the Department has been formed in 1862 that
no one else can see this data or have access to it
and now another department has access to it and just,
I know it's all in the interest of security and
the country but explaining that to farmers and
ranchers and making sure they're aware because
there is a concern over there of maintaining the
privacy and maintaining the confidentiality yet
addressing the new world that we're living in that
you have to guard against these cyber security
threats and that how to blend those two together
and still get the American public's cooperation is
something that I think not only NASS, as a statistical
agency but statistical agencies in general, are
going to have to address in the future.
Good, well thank you very much for sharing your
history and your legacy.
Thank you, thank you.
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