US county-level agricultural crop production typology

Crop production is an important variable in social, economic and environmental analyses. There is an abundance of crop data available for the United States, but we lack a typology of county-level crop production that accounts for production similarities in counties across the country. We fill this gap with a county-level classification of crop production with ten mutually exclusive categories across the contiguous United States.

To create the typology we ran a cluster analysis on acreage data for 21 key crops from the United States Department of Agriculture's 2012 Agricultural Census. Prior to clustering, we estimated undisclosed county acreage values, controlled for acreage in other crop types, and removed counties with low agricultural production to produce proportional scores for each crop type in each county. We used proportional scores to control for the influence of county size in the cluster analysis and used internal and stability measures to validate the analysis. The final dataset features 2922 counties. Future research can leverage this typology as an input for county- or regional-level analysis.