Crop cutting surveys ramped up for better farm production estimates

The CCEs are a method used to estimate crop yield by harvesting a small, randomly selected area of a field

Starting this month, the National Statistics Office (NSO) has ramped up the number of crop cutting experiments conducted across the country in a bid to improve the accuracy of crop yield estimates and farm output projections that are critical for policy decisions such as the imposition of export curbs on certain agricultural products. 

“The work on an increased number of Crop Cutting Experiments (CCE) is being undertaken from the new agricultural year, commencing from July,” the Minister of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) Rao Inderjit Singh told Business Standard in an email interview.  

“The estimates of crop production based on new data will be prepared during the upcoming harvest seasons of kharif and rabi in 2025-26. The increased sample size is expected to increase the precision of crop yield estimates based on supervised CCEs and will ensure better quality assurance of crop statistics in India,” added Singh.  

CCEs are used to estimate crop yields by harvesting a small, randomly selected area of a field. This involves physically harvesting, threshing, and weighing the produce from the selected plot to estimate the yield of a specific crop. 

“The increase in the number of CCEs will also help estimate production for new and emerging crops, particularly fruits such as berries, avocados, dragon fruit, and kiwi” an official aware of the development conveyed. 

“The current manual method fails to provide any estimates for these new, diversified crops that farmers have started growing. This marks a significant leap forward in agricultural data collection, as current methods only cover the 25–26 major kharif crops such as rice, maize, and jowar,” the official added, requesting anonymity. 

Inaccurate crop production numbers hamper effective decision-making. For example, the Centre’s second advance estimate for foodgrains production for the crop year 2022-23 (July-June) had scaled up the wheat production for 2021-22 to 107.7 million tonnes, up from 106 million tonnes in the previous estimate, leading to dismay among market players and traders. 

Traders felt that if wheat production in the 2021-22 crop year was indeed almost 108 million tonnes, there was no need to ban exports and, most importantly, prices in the market would not have climbed to record highs throughout the year. 

Similarly, for 2021-22, the Centre’s first advance estimate pegged cotton output at around 36.21 million bales. But by the time the fourth estimates were released, the production had been revised downward by 14 per cent to 31.20 million bales. This meant that while India was looking to export cotton, it had to eventually scramble for supplies to meet the rising yarn and textile industry demand within seven to eight months. 

Such revisions have been frequent in many other crops as well, leading to misplaced price projections and inflation control strategies. Predicting price signals based on projections of lower output, often leads to the use of harsh and draconian policy measures such as export bans, stock limit impositions, suspension of futures trading, et al.  Officials said they expect the higher sample size for CCEs to bring more clarity to projections as well as policy formulation. 

About 130 retired government officials with field experience in farm statistics are being hired as consultants in a supervisory capacity for ‘area enumeration and yield statistics’ who will help guide the enhanced crop cutting experiments to be undertaken by the NSO.