In an abrupt about-face, the United States Department of Agriculture has decided to reverse a decision to eliminate dozens of long-standing statistical reports on a wide range of farming activities, including beekeeping, hop growing and flower farming. The agency’s statistics service said in October that it was forced by budget constraints to cut the reports and that doing so would save $11 million a year.

That led to an outcry from farm groups that said the information collected by the agency was essential. Farmers rely on the reports to decide how much to plant and how many animals to raise; they use the information to persuade bankers to lend them money and to advocate for other types of government support.

So now the Agriculture Department has reinstated most of the reports that had been given the ax. Saved are the reports on trout farming, catfish farming, floriculture, sheep and goats, bees and honey production and mink farming, among others.

Mitt Walker, director of the Alabama Catfish Producers, said the sudden switch was probably “a result of the outcry from the affected commodities,” a reference to farm trade groups.

He said his group had contacted the agency to protest the loss of monthly reports on the amount of catfish processed and feed deliveries and twice-yearly reports on the number of catfish raised on farms. “We explained to them how critical these reports were to the industry,” he said.

The U.S.D.A. said in a notice this month that savings obtained by creating a national operations center to centralize data collection had freed enough money to keep the reports going. A U.S.D.A. spokesman did not return calls on Friday.

Ann E. George, administrator of the Hop Growers of America, in Moxee, Wash., said she had been told there was enough money to continue the reporting through next September, when the federal fiscal year ends.

In recent years, the hops industry has been paying U.S.D.A. $15,000 a year to help finance reports on hop stocks and production. In what amounted to an unexpected gift, the group was told that it would not have to pay the fee this coming year.

Ms. George said, however, that the group would hold the money in reserve in case federal funding ran out to keep the reports going in the next fiscal year.

Not all agriculture groups benefited from the sudden change, however.

The agency appeared set to go ahead with plans to eliminate a report on the nursery industry and to reduce the frequency of reports on potato stockpiles and the use of farm pesticides and fertilizers.

Reversals of this type are not unusual, although the speed with which the agency changed course may be. Many U.S.D.A. reports were eliminated in budget-cutting in 1982, but most were restored a year later.

“It was a nice surprise,” said Mark Jensen, president of the American Honey Producers Association and an owner of Smoot Honey in Power, Mont.