County-level agroforestry reported in the 2017 U.S. Census of Agriculture

Agroforestry is the intentional integration of trees and shrubs into crop and animal farming systems. Understanding agroforestry adoption in the United States is critical to serve as a baseline of existing systems and for future planning purposes. Currently there is very little information available, at a national level, that can fill in this critical information gap. No nationwide inventory of agroforestry currently exists. The 2017 Census of Agriculture (COA) from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) was determined to be the most robust dataset to assess which farms are using agroforestry. While the COA does not differentiate the type of agroforestry used (e.g., windbreak, silvopasture, forest farming, alley cropping, riparian forest buffer) it does provide county-level numbers of farms practicing agroforestry. These raw numbers, available from the NASS website in tabular format, can then be joined to county-level datasets to provide thematic maps. This publication contains vector polygon spatial data in multiple formats that include the number of farms reporting agroforestry, the total number of farms, and the percent of farms using agroforestry for each county in the U.S as of 2017.
The raw data were produced by the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Survey (NASS) 2017 Census of Agriculture (COA.) The COA is a count of U.S. farms and ranches and looks at land use, ownership, production practices, income, and other characteristics. It is completed every 5 years. The 2017 COA was the first census to ask if a producer practices any of the agroforestry practices. While NASS produces a variety of types of maps and data, there currently existed no maps of agroforestry results from the COA. The purpose of this project was to use the raw census number to create a spatial layer for visualization, mapping, and analysis purposes.
For more information about these data, see Smith et al. (2022)