agricultural census

[cowman]

I filled out the ag census. When it came to the questions about how much my land and machinery was worth I answered "I have no idea". So what happens...I get a phone call from my friendly census taker informing me that is not good enough and I would have to come up with some numbers or they would keep calling me! So I told her if the damned government was so interested in what it was worth they should send out an assessor. So she says just put a figure on it, whether accurate or not. So I told her all the money in the world wouldn't buy my land...she was not happy!
In the comments section I had also stated that I thought this was the biggest waste of time I'd ever heard of and not to send me any more of this crap...so I guess I will be probably be harrassed by my wonderful government from here on in! It probably doesn't pay to buck city hall!

[cakadu]

Well cowman, I would say you're farther ahead of the game than about 20,000 of your counterparts who reportedly have not sent in their census at all. For years we kept getting called by the census people wanting to know how much grain we grew and I kept telling them that we had only grassland and didn't have grain. The callers (who by the way phoned after 9 p.m. many times) then asked if we had any grain in bins and I replied that we don't grow grain but we do have some in the bin that we buy to feed our animals. How much do you have on hand - and my answer was similar to yours. If you want to know, send someone out to count it. It took them about 5 years to finally catch on to the fact that we don't grow grain and never will.

Apparently these spot census takers call one out of every 20 farmers, so hopefully they got the message and will call one of the 19 remaining farmers in my group.

When I refused to answer any more questions I had someone higher up the ladder call and tell me it was an offence not to answer. I wonder how far they will push the approximately 20,000 people who didn't answer anything at all?