Q1) The U.S. Department of Agriculture records data on farm acreage and the number of farms by county for every county in the country. This takes considerable time and energy, and the results for each update (usually occurring approximately every five years) are a long time in process. A quicker way to update the data is by sampling. The table below shows the number of counties in each geographic region; the farm acres (in thousands) for samples taken in the mid-1990s are available in this spreadsheet & . These are independent random samples of 22 counties from each region. Region Number of counties North Central 1052 North East 210 South 1376 West 418