Recently, there has been considerable debate in the government, business and academic communities regarding the value, accuracy, frequency and necessity of government crop forecasts. This debate has intensified due to several developments. The first is the recent trend toward slowing the growth in non-defense public sector expenditures. As the federal budget has been stretched tighter, some information activities have been curtailed. These cutbacks have coincided with a second, not necessarily uncorrelated, development; the increased sophistication of private information collection activities. Private firms now partially duplicate government efforts to disseminate information on, and predictions of, crop forecasts.