USDA Announces Availability of New Agricultural Transportation Data

USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service today announced the launch of the Fertilizer Transportation Dashboard and a Pacific Northwest Barge Rate Data Series on the Agricultural Transportation Open Data Platform (AgTransport). The enhancements help build resilience in the agrifood supply chain by providing needed visibility into transportation markets through publicly available data.<_o3a_p>

The Fertilizer Transportation Dashboard<_o3a_p>

The Fertilizer Transportation Dashboard offers a variety of important, regularly updated fertilizer supply chain and transportation indicators. These indicators include fertilizer production, inventory, and disappearance data for each primary nutrient (i.e., nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium); U.S. fertilizer imports (both by primary nutrient and by individual fertilizer commodity); and fertilizer price data by region for key fertilizer commodities (i.e., ammonia, urea, UAN, DAP, MAP, and potash). The dashboard also includes rail volume and shipment characteristics from the Surface Transportation Board's public-use carload waybill sample; weekly rail carloads of fertilizer; a collection of rail tariff rates (i.e., fertilizer freight costs) for key routes by fertilizer commodity; and monthly barge volumes for key locks on the Mississippi River System. The Fertilizer Transportation Dashboard builds on AMS' response to its request for information regarding fertilizer and other agricultural inputs, stemming from the Executive Order on "Promoting Competition in the American Economy."<_o3a_p>

The Pacific Northwest Barge Rate Data Series<_o3a_p>

The series is the first of its kind to provide grain barge rates for the Columbia-Snake River System, which moves, on average, roughly 31 million tons of grain per year, with wheat and soybeans making up about 67 percent of all grain shipped. Along with the weekly spot rate data published for downbound grain barges along the Mississippi River System, the expanded coverage of the new barge rate data series will provide broader visibility into the grain transportation market, and help monitor market anomalies, such as transportation disruptions. This data series was developed in response to stakeholder requests to provide publicly available grain barge data for the Columbia-Snake River System.<_o3a_p>

AgTransport Platform<_o3a_p>

These enhancements to the AgTransport Platform, first launched in 2019, support USDA's strategic priority in creating more, new, and better market opportunities. The AgTransport platform offers farmers, commodity analysts, elevator operators, shippers and other stakeholders access to USDA data that can help them make timely market decisions about moving agricultural products across the country and around the world.<_o3a_p>

The platform allows users to gain personalized insight through interactive charts, unique visualizations and data views that are updated automatically over time. In addition, users can easily access and download public, historical data about the transportation of agricultural products by rail, truck, barge, and ocean vessel. Visit AgTransport to get started. <_o3a_p>

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