County-level agroforestry reported in the 2017 and 2022 U.S. Census of Agriculture: 2nd edition

In the United States, agroforestry is commonly defined as a suite of land management practices that intentionally integrate woody plants (trees, shrubs, vines, etc.) with crop and/or animal production systems. Understanding agroforestry adoption in the United States is critical to serve as a baseline of existing agroforestry systems and for future planning purposes. There is growing interest in identifying where future systems are most likely to occur. Since 2017, the Census of Agriculture (COA) from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) has asked whether farm operations have 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 farm operations practicing agroforestry. These raw numbers, available from the NASS website in tabular format, can then be joined to county-level geospatial data to provide thematic maps. This data publication includes vector polygon spatial data in multiple formats that includes the number of farm operations reporting agroforestry, the total number of farms, and the percentage of farm operations reporting agroforestry for each county in the U.S. in 2017 and 2022. The change in the proportion of farms reporting agroforestry from 2017 to 2022 is also included.
The raw data were produced by the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Survey (NASS) Census of Agriculture (COA.) The COA is completed every 5 years and is a count of U.S. farms and ranches from which $1,000 or more of agricultural products were produced and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the census year. It also looks at land use, ownership, production practices, income, and other characteristics. The 2017 COA was the first census to ask if producers have any of the five common agroforestry practices (windbreak, silvopasture, forest farming, alley cropping, riparian forest buffer.) NASS included the same agroforestry question in the 2022 COA, allowing for the first national-level trend analysis for agroforestry extent in the United States. The National Agroforestry Center published the first maps depicting the agroforestry results from the COA in 2017 and have now created a new series of maps to reflect newly published agroforestry data from the 2022 COA. In addition, maps showing change in agroforestry at the national scale have been created, using data from the 2017 and 2022 COA. The purpose of this project was to use the raw census numbers to create a spatial layer for visualization, mapping, and analysis purposes.
For more information about these data, see Kellerman et al. (2025) and Smith et al. (2022). The first edition of these data, Kellerman (2023, https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2023-0044) contains 2017 data. This second edition includes the same 2017 data, but a different source for county boundaries was used (more details below), as well as the addition to 2022 data.