Economic Research Service
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| Agency overview | |
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| Formed | April 3, 1961 |
| Jurisdiction | United States Department of Agriculture |
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The Economic Research Service (ERS) is a component of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and a principal agency of the Federal Statistical System of the United States. It provides information and research on agriculture and economics.
The first USDA agency formally tasked with data collection was the Division of Statistics, created in 1863, one year after the USDA itself was created. By 1902, a Division of Foreign Markets had been created, and the following year, that division was merged with the Division of Statistics to form the Bureau of Statistics. In 1914, the bureau was renamed the Bureau of Crop Estimates, and in 1921 this bureau merged with the Bureau of Markets to form the Bureau of Markets and Crop Estimates. This merger brought together "responsibility for the collection of farm-level crop and livestock data with that for major domestic and foreign commodity market transactions" in a single agency.
While the USDA's data collection activities were developing, the department was also developing expertise in agricultural economics research. In 1903, the Office of Farm Management was formed within the Bureau of Plant Industry. In 1915, this office was transferred to the Office of the Secretary to provide analytic support during World War I. In 1919, the office was renamed in Office of Farm Management and Farm Economics. In 1920, the office became a separate USDA agency.
In 1922, the Bureau of Agricultural Economics (BAE), the ERS's immediate predecessor, was established by the merger of the Office of Farm Management and Farm Economics and the Bureau of Markets and Crop Estimates, bringing together responsibility for data collection and economic research/analysis in a single agency. This new agency brought together for the first time in data collection and economic analysis and research. The first leader of the BAE was the pioneering agricultural economist Henry Charles Taylor, appointed by Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace. In its initial years the BAE recruited agricultural economists from the handful of land-grant universities that offered the Ph.D in agriculture, such as Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Cornell.
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