Crop cutting surveys ramped up for better farm output estimates

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.

- SHIVA RAJORA

"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.