Foreign persons report holding 46.3 million acres of US agricultural land — 3.6 percent of privately held farmland, nearly double the 2010 figure. Thirty state legislatures are writing laws about the number while almost nobody reads the register it comes from. A sourced walk through the AFIDA data: who holds American farmland, what held really means, and why the condition of the register is the sharpest finding in it.
The US food-safety system is split across three federal agencies — CDC epidemiology, USDA FSIS recalls of meat and poultry, and FDA recalls of everything else — and the chain from a detected outbreak to the recall that pulls contaminated food off shelves only comes together when their datasets are joined. This guide traces that chain through public, key-free data, aligning the records by pathogen, product, firm, and time.
The USDA Food and Nutrition Service publishes monthly SNAP participation and benefit data by state — total participants, households, benefits issued, average benefit per person, and issuance history going back to 1969. The data shows how food assistance responds to recessions, pandemic aid expansions, and state-level work requirement policies. Here is what the data contains, how to access it, and what 50 years of SNAP data reveals.
Every year the federal government calls roughly 400,000 Americans and asks how tall they are, how much they weigh, how often they exercise, and how many vegetables they eat. The CDC Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity dataset is the state-by-state distillation of those answers — the most comprehensive federal record of how American health behavior varies across geography, income, race, and education.
The openFDA Food Enforcement dataset surfaces every food and cosmetic recall the FDA has classified through its Recall Enterprise System — roughly 25,000 records carrying the recall reason, recalling firm, hazard class (I, II, III), distribution footprint, and the dates that trace each recall from initiation to termination.
The CDC Foodborne Disease Outbreak Surveillance System tracks every reported multi-person foodborne illness outbreak in the United States — pathogen, implicated food, setting, illness count, hospitalizations, and deaths — covering 800+ outbreaks per year across all food categories.
The USDA Economic Research Service publishes the most comprehensive federal data on food and agricultural economics — farm income and wealth statistics, food price indices, food security measurements, rural county classifications, and commodity supply-and-use tables spanning decades of US agricultural history.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is the largest US food assistance program — 42 million participants, $100 billion in annual benefits, and one of the largest automatic stabilizers in the federal budget.
FSIS regulates 6,500+ meat, poultry, and egg processing establishments covering 80+ billion pounds of product annually. The three-class recall system escalates from Class III (mislabeling) to Class I (health hazard). The 2008 Hallmark/Westland recall (143M lbs, largest ever) involved downer cattle. E. coli O157:H7 is a zero-tolerance adulterant. Here is the Establishments.csv schema, FSIS recall database API, GenomeTrakr WGS pathogen tracing, HACCP plan requirements, PHIS inspection reports, and a Python recall trend analysis by Class and commodity.
USDA ERS publishes agricultural economic data across farm income ($116B net farm income in 2023), food prices (monthly CPI food outlook, 2022's +11.4% grocery price surge), food security (13.5% of households food insecure in 2023, 47M people), commodity program costs (ARC/PLC reference prices), and rural America (Beale Codes 1–9 classifying all 3,100+ counties, 180+ rural hospital closures since 2010). The Food Access Research Atlas maps food deserts at the census-tract level.
The USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service conducts 400+ surveys annually, reaching 3 million respondents to produce the authoritative federal record of US crop production, livestock inventories, commodity prices, and agricultural prices since 1867. Here is the Crop Production report, WASDE supply-demand balance sheets, the QuickStats API (eight parameters, 50,000 record limit), weekly Crop Progress with Good/Excellent condition ratings, the five major crops (corn 35% of cropland, soybeans competing with Brazil, winter/spring wheat, cotton, rice), the 2012 drought sending corn to $8.49/bushel and soybeans above $17, Cattle on Feed, Hogs and Pigs quarterly, Prices Received/Paid, and a Python QuickStats API script to plot state-level corn yield per acre for the top 5 producing states over 20 years.