Communications' staff of editors, artists and typesetters produces about 300 publications each year, of all possible descriptions. But we hope that all of them are very useful to you and to your audiences. It's quite a job to keep this high volume of publishing on track, try to complete materials when they are needed, and take care of quality control on each publication. To help us do that, we have a planning and scheduling system for publications. Agricultural Communications First, we find out what needs the counties have for publications.
Communications sends out a county poll.
It lists all the current publications. We ask agents to tell us how many copies of each publication they will need to order in the coming calendar year. That's planning far in advance, but usually agents can guess what their needs will be based on past experience. The poll also asks agents what new topics they would like to have publications on. Once we get the polls back from the counties we add up all the numbers to find out how many copies of each publication will be needed in the coming year.