# Washington's share of U.S. commercial apple production, 2000-2025

FactHub-curated dataset. Not an official USDA publication. All production, value and acreage figures are USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) estimates; FactHub computed the shares and comparisons.

## What this is
State and U.S. commercial apple production (total and utilized), value of utilized production, bearing acreage and fresh-market production for 2000-2025, plus Census of Agriculture apple acreage for 2002-2022, with saved analyses of Washington's share.

## Sources and year coverage
- 2000-2002: NASS Noncitrus Fruits and Nuts 2002 Summary (July 2003), apple tables.
- 2003-2004: NASS Noncitrus Fruits and Nuts 2005 Summary (July 2006).
- 2005-2006: NASS Noncitrus Fruits and Nuts 2007 Summary (July 2008, revised).
- 2007-2025: NASS Quick Stats survey estimates (latest revisions).
- Census of Agriculture apple acreage (2002, 2007, 2012, 2017, 2022): NASS Quick Stats, program CENSUS.
- 2026 forecast (total production): NASS Quick Stats (August 2026 Crop Production forecast).
Each year comes from one source. Overlapping years in other NASS files are compared in quality-report.md.

## How the Quick Stats files were obtained
The Quick Stats API needs a key, so fetch_sources.js uses the public Quick Stats web interface: it POSTs the query form to https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/uuid/encode and downloads the CSV export from /data/spreadsheet/<id>.csv. The queries are listed in source-manifest.json.

## Method
1. Parse the fixed-width state tables in the three older NASS summaries (columns are matched by position; blank cells stay empty).
2. Read the Quick Stats CSV, keep annual state and national rows with domain TOTAL, and convert pounds to million pounds and dollars to thousand dollars.
3. Washington share = Washington utilized production / U.S. utilized production. The same ratio is computed for total production, value, bearing acres and fresh-market production.
4. Second-largest state and Washington-to-second ratio use utilized production among individually published states.
5. Sensitivity: since 2018 NASS publishes seven states (CA, MI, NY, OR, PA, VA, WA) and its U.S. total is their sum. The adjusted share adds back 631.5 million pounds, the 2015-2017 average utilized production of all other states.

## Definitions (NASS)
- Commercial apple estimates cover orchards of 100 or more bearing-age trees.
- Total production includes unharvested fruit and fruit harvested but not sold; utilized production excludes both.
- Value of utilized production is NASS's price per pound times utilized production.

## Reproduce
node fetch_sources.js raw; node analyze.js raw results; node build_release.js raw results <dir with archives.json> release
Node.js 20 or later, no packages. Quick Stats returns current data, so later NASS revisions may change 2007-2025 values slightly.