The Farm Service Agency updated their Tennessee certified acres for September and a summary of the planted and failed acres can be found at FSA TN Certified Acres 9 17 13. FSA will continue to make revisions to their certified acres as additional information becomes available. These acres are a major piece of the information used in factoring in the USDA acres in the USDA monthly reports. They are not the only information used as there generally are crops planted that are not certified to FSA. The number of those acres in Tennessee is usually low, but nationwide they do add up.  Highlights of the Tennessee data include 795,455 acres of planted corn for grain; 245,345 acres of cotton planted; 16,182 acres of grain sorghum planted; 1,498,361 acres of soybeans for grain planted; and 534,307 acres of wheat for grain planted. These numbers also include acres that were planted and were certified failed.

FSA does allow producers to certify and report irrigated acres. However, they are dependent on producers notifying them what acres are irrigated. This information does seem to be improving, however, some irrigated acres are most likely certified as non-irrigated. In Tennessee, there were 142,986 acres of corn, cotton and soybeans certified as irrigated.  A breakdown of certified irrigated and non-irrigated acres by crop by county can be found in this Excel spreadsheet – FSA acres Sept 17 13 TN. This also includes prevented planted acres. In Tennessee, there were 67,410 acres of prevented planted corn for grain, 43,208 acres of prevented planted cotton, and 14,604 acres of prevented planted soybeans for grain. This includes both irrigated and non-irrigated acres.

FSA initially released this data August 15 and will continue to update it monthly around the middle of the month until the final report in January, 2014. This information is posted at http://www.fsa.usda.gov/FSA/webapp?area=newsroom&subject=landing&topic=foi-er-fri-cad.