Which USDA Datasets Cover Fertilizer Use by Crop?

Exactly two USDA records sit in Datadory's fertilizers & agricultural chemicals slice, and both are U.S. Government works in the commercial delivery terms.

USDA ERS Fertilizer Use and Price (quality score 9) is the consolidated archive: one 804 KB XLS workbook holding 33 worksheets — a table of contents plus 32 tables — with national consumption from 1960 and crop-level application panels. USDA NASS Agricultural Chemical Use Program (quality score 8) is the live survey layer: on-farm chemical-use statistics since 1990, delivered through NASS Quick Stats across roughly 20 crops and hundreds of pesticide active ingredients alongside the four fertilizer nutrients.

The two are linked by design rather than accident: ERS cites the NASS Agricultural Chemical Use Program as a source behind its workbook, so the static file and the API describe the same underlying survey system from different vantage points. They are two of the six quality-score-9-or-better records in this 19-primary-dataset slice, 13 of whose records are free — against a catalog-wide average of 7.81 across the 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs.

Tables 9 through 32 are the crop answer. For corn they are tables 9-14, cotton 15-20, soybeans 21-26 and wheat 27-32; within each block of six, every one of nitrogen, phosphate and potash gets a table of percent of acreage receiving the nutrient and a table of rate per fertilized acre, broken out by surveyed state. Each worksheet holds roughly 30-60 rows of years or states against 3-20 columns.

Coverage is wide but not total: surveyed states represented about 93 percent of planted corn acres, 96 percent of soybeans, 89 percent of cotton and 85 percent of winter wheat. Table 2 adds a coarser national cut — plant nutrient use by selected crops (corn, cotton, soybeans, wheat and an "other" bucket) from 1964 through 2018 — and Table 1 gives the [plant nutrient]( /glossary/plant-nutrient ) totals, in thousands of short tons, for fertilizer years ending June 30 from 1960 through 2015.

Watch the reference periods before quoting anything: the consumption tables close on a June 30 fertilizer year while the crop application tables sit on a calendar or crop year. ERS draws the 1960-1993 history from Statistical Bulletin No. 893 and credits AAPFCO, The Fertilizer Institute and NASS surveys for the rest.

The ERS workbook is deliberately narrow: four row crops — corn, cotton, soybeans and wheat — plus an "other" aggregate in Table 2. If your crop is potatoes, rice or grapes, the workbook will not answer.

The NASS Agricultural Chemical Use Program is broader and rotates. Ten field crops (cotton, corn, potatoes, soybeans, wheat, barley, oats, peanuts, rice and sorghum) are surveyed annually in cooperation with ERS under the Agricultural Resource Management Survey. Fruit chemical use runs biennially in odd years — 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2025 — and vegetables biennially in even years from 2010 through 2024, each targeting the top-producing states that together account for the majority of U.S. acres or production of the crop.

Nutrient coverage also differs. ERS tracks nitrogen (N), phosphate (P2O5) and potash (K2O); NASS publishes those three plus sulfur (S) since 2005, and pairs every fertilizer estimate with pesticide active-ingredient records classified by herbicide, fungicide and insecticide.

Four measures carry the program: percentage of acreage treated, rates of application, total amounts applied and number of applications. In Quick Stats these surface as fields such as percent of area planted (rounded to whole percent), average pounds per acre per application, average pounds per acre per year, and totals rounded to 100,000 pounds for fertilizer.

Granularity is per crop year, per state, per fertilizer nutrient or pesticide active ingredient, with multi-state aggregates published alongside. Field work concentrates on the top-producing states, supported by state partnerships with California, Minnesota, North Dakota, Washington and Wisconsin.

Since 2009 all results flow through Quick Stats (select Program = Survey); pre-2009 full-text reports live in ESMIS/NAL, with selected 1990-2008 results also loaded into the database. Participation is voluntary and responses confidential, so published tables suppress individual-farm values behind (D), (NA) and (Z) disclosure codes. Stated users include the EPA for product reviews, USGS for water-quality work, state agencies and chemical manufacturers.

A reproducible path from nothing to a cited number:

Then resolution. Neither source publishes farm-level microdata — Quick Stats carries aggregated estimates only — and NASS suppresses small cells with disclosure codes. The biennial fruit and vegetable rotation leaves single-year gaps by design, post-harvest and livestock chemical records stop at 2010, and NASS's August 28, 2025 ASB notice on discontinuing select data collection programs means any specific series should be confirmed current before you build on it. For continuous recent series with crop detail outside the four ERS crops, Great Britain's Defra survey is the nearest substitute in this catalog.

For a deeper dive on the agronomic question behind this page, our walkthrough of nitrogen application rates by crop benchmarks the same ERS and NASS series against Great Britain's crop-level survey, and the guide to free fertilizer consumption data by country covers the country aggregates you would join to a crop-rate analysis. The fertilizers-agricultural-chemicals data hub indexes every catalog record in one place.