Joe Davis is a numbers man. His brain is full of them, and every gigabyte of his phone and two laptops is crammed full. So naturally, when it comes time for the retired chemical engineer to answer a question or solve a problem, he turns to figures. “I don’t like to deal with ‘kinda’ or ‘it depends,’” he says.

Earlier this year, the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (USDA-NASS) released data from the 2017 Census of Agriculture.