Fifty pastures are to be resource inventoried in 2007 in five selected states across the United States. A new set of procedures for collecting the resource information in the field is being tested. The new protocols will collect for the first time the plant species present and their abundance in US pastures. The protocols will also reveal more about the environmental condition of the pastures, such as plant vigor, soil fertility status, soil cover, and the presence of brush or noxious weeds. The current objective of this test is to display the usefulness of field collected data over that achieved by remote sensing alone. The ultimate objective is to produce more useful pasture resource information for use by graziers, researchers, grazing lands personnel in USDA and University Extension, and the various agricultural industries that support grazing land farmers and ranchers. The current National Resource Inventory (NRI) for pasturelands is limited in scope. It mainly displays soil loss, each land capability class's acreage devoted to pasture, acreage trends, three generalized pasture types, and acreage shifts among land uses. This paper seeks to inform potential users of this important test and milestone in gathering resource information on pastures to secure their support for this effort on a national scale in coming years. Preliminary results of the test will be presented. This will include interpretations of the fifty pasture data set as well as a brief critique of methodology issues that arose.