The Agricultural Production Survey: The purpose and operation

The Agricultural Production Survey (APS) is Statistics New Zealand’s vehicle for collecting important information about New Zealand’s primary production. It is an annual postal survey and covers land use, livestock and arable farming, horticultural and forestry production, and selected farm practices. The APS programme started with a census in 2002, and continues a history of official statistics that covers agriculture over the past 150 years. The programme has been designed to provide a relevant and stable time series of data, which this paper will demonstrate by describing the programme’s methodology and operation.