by Dave Brown, April 2024

So you’re a farmer in or near Rhode Island thinking about what you might best produce in coming seasons. Or with a group that’s helping to channel food to limited-means families, and wondering what might be good buys this year. Or seeking to reinforce such as a town board member or state legislator. To have perspectives about commodity price trends, seasonal variations and unusual fluctuations can be a big help.

Let me share with you some sources of facts and analyses about recent ag price movements that I find useful:

A reliable “go to” source is the Economic Research Service of USDA. Here’s a link to the ERS spreadsheet, “Selected Weekly Fresh-Market Vegetable Movement & Price”. Note how you can pull up previous weeks, years and decades … or a wider set of commodities … production trends … import-export patterns … special study reports … and much more. (ERS has a long history of providing dependable, non-politicized info. A number of my best grad students have made their careers with that agency.)

Another USDA agency, the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), publishes raw production and price data details for specific states and regions. Here’s a link to the NASS “New England Vegetable Report, 2023 Season”. It has yields/acre and prices/pound for the previous five years, for single states and New England as a whole. This link to the NASS home page opens the door to a wealth of additional data.

The Agricultural Marketing Service of USDA has current-trading information that would be useful if you’re already into certain commodities and need to stay posted every day or week. For example, see this USDA/AMS page for specialty crops.

Viewing the world-wide supply and demand picture helps set our nearby and U.S. price wobbles in context. The USDA Foreign Agricultural Service provides lots of details for key international commodities. FAS has a series of Production, Supply and Distribution reports that reflect a blend of systematic data gathering and first-hand information from our agricultural attaches who work abroad. As seen by this PSD online link, the reports include coffee and some other crops not commonly grown in the U.S.

Augmenting this are the supply-and-demand overviews from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. (I was FAO’s Situation and Outlook Service Chief, 1982-87.) A good starting point is this World Food Situation online page. Note how FAO identifies shortages, surpluses, policies, and emerging patterns that may indirectly affect our own prices for basic commodities and processed foods.

For a unique, user-friendly source that brings many U.S. and world economic indicators together, explore the St. Louis Fed’s “FRED”. (Each Federal Reserve Bank branch in the U.S. has its own special offerings.) See especially FRED’s commodity price series that include a few processed foods as well as basic products. Some of the series go back to the 1990s and 1980s. Note that FRED is copyrighted.

Using price information for good decisions Going beyond prices themselves, the ins and outs of a commodity that you may be thinking about can be browsed via the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center (AgMRC). It was created by Iowa State University with help from USDA. For example, if you’re wondering about hazelnuts as a future income-earner for a farm with woods that you’ve inherited, AgMRC offers this page for starters. Moreover, AgMRC’s State Resources page provides specific links to relevant helps and groups that are available to us in Rhode Island and nearby.

(end of this web page)