How to Check Crop and Livestock Prices in the USA

Most confusion about American price data comes from mixing up two agencies. USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) runs Market News, which reports what is being bid and traded right now. USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) runs the Price Program, which surveys what farmers actually received, weeks after the fact. They are not substitutes for each other.

AMS Market News covers cotton and tobacco, dairy and milk products, fruits, vegetables and specialty crops, livestock, meats, poultry, eggs, grain and hay, organic, and local and regional foods. AMS issued its first Market News report in 1915, by telegraph, carrying the price of strawberries at Hammond, Louisiana. USDA's centenary account of the service, published in 2015, put the output at more than 250,000 reports a year; treat that as an order of magnitude rather than a current count. For specialty crops, reporters collect data through direct contacts with sales personnel, suppliers, brokers and buyers, and AMS says the data is made available within hours of collection at no cost.

NASS is on a monthly clock. Its Agricultural Prices publication contains prices received by producers for principal crops, livestock and livestock products, indexes of prices received by producers, feed price ratios, indexes of prices paid by producers, and parity prices. The 2026 release calendar puts it at 3:00 p.m. Eastern on 31 August, 29 September, 30 October, 30 November and 30 December. A NASS state average is a benchmark for judging a season. It is not a bid you can sell into today.

AMS publishes through the My Market News portal. Reports were migrated off plain-text files onto the MARS platform and converted from text to PDF; archived notices on the old .txt reports still carry the message that the report will move to the new platform. There is a free public API for general Market News at marsapi.ams.usda.gov, a separate endpoint for Livestock Mandatory Reporting data at mpr.datamart.ams.usda.gov, and an MMN API to Excel user guide for people who do not write code. AMS also publishes a Market News mobile app for Apple and Android devices. USDA reports can be delivered by email through USDA's Economics, Statistics and Market Information System, which moved from Cornell University to the National Agricultural Library and now sits at esmis.nal.usda.gov; the old Cornell address redirects there.

A daily state grain bid report gives you the commodity and class with any quality qualifier, such as US 1 Hard Red Winter Wheat up to 12 per cent protein; a bid range in dollars per bushel; the change in cents against the previous day; the words not available where no bid was collected; an explicit as-of cut-off time; and the reporting office with a named reporter and phone number. The header also carries a publication timestamp and a Preliminary or Final flag, so you can tell exactly when the numbers were fixed.

AMS's own description of the Nebraska Daily Elevator Grain Bids report says it contains price spreads and simple averages for individual grain commodities and may include a basis calculated from the current day or prior day close of a publicly traded futures price, with the exchange identified as the Chicago Board of Trade, the Minneapolis Grain Exchange or the Kansas City Board of Trade. Two of those three names are out of date. CME Group completed its acquisition of the Kansas City Board of Trade on 3 December 2012, and hard red winter wheat futures now list on the Chicago Board of Trade. The Minneapolis Grain Exchange was renamed MIAX Futures Exchange on 1 October 2024, and its hard red spring wheat contract is now branded Minneapolis Hard Red Spring Wheat. The AMS boilerplate has not caught up. The underlying futures prices are the same ones.

Coverage is uneven by design. Most state grain bid reports are daily, but California, Indiana and Maryland are weekly, so check the frequency on the report you want rather than assuming. Minnesota also has a Minneapolis Daily Basis Report, and there is a Louisiana and Texas Gulf Export Bids and Basis report. For statistics rather than daily prices, NASS Quick Stats is the searchable database of NASS estimates, developed from data collected through hundreds of annual sample surveys and the Census of Agriculture, with a free API for direct programmatic access. The Census is taken once every five years and counts even small plots where $1,000 or more of products were raised and sold, or normally would have been sold, during the census year. Data from the 2022 Census was released on 13 February 2024.

AMS grain prices are released under Voluntary Price Reporting authority, in the words of the agency's own report description. Nobody is legally obliged to give AMS a grain bid. That is why the map has holes in it and why some states get a weekly report rather than a daily one.

AMS explains how the data is gathered and filtered. Price information is collected remotely through phone communication, email and company websites, with contact visits made periodically to verify that the information is accurate, unbiased and relevant. Reporters reserve the right to exclude insignificant data sets and outliers that are not consistent with the majority of the trades or bids. A published range has therefore already been cleaned. If you sold at an unusual number, your trade may not be in it.

Livestock, meat and poultry work on the opposite principle. Under Livestock Mandatory Reporting, market information is submitted by reporting packers at required times specified in the LMR Act, a reporter contacts each participating company to verify, exclude or correct the submitted data, and AMS runs on-site compliance verification audits at each reporting plant. Those reports carry volumes, pricing ranges and weighted average prices. There is a live legal caveat that matters in 2026. LMR rests on the Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act of 1999 (7 U.S.C. 1635-1636i), implemented on 2 April 2001 with regulations at 7 CFR part 59. Authority lapsed on 30 September 2005, was re-established in 2006, reauthorised in 2010 and again in 2015 through 30 September 2020, and since that expiry it has been maintained through a series of short extensions rather than new multi-year statutory reauthorisations. The most recent, Public Law 119-37, enacted 12 November 2025, extended LMR authority to 30 September 2026. It may well be extended again, but as of this post's date that is the horizon. We have not seen a primary source stating what would happen to the reports if the authority lapsed, so we will not guess.

One naming note, because older guides route people to a dead agency. GIPSA no longer exists as a standalone agency; grain inspection and the Packers and Stockyards Act functions now sit inside AMS, and the nomenclature changes appear at 84 FR 45645, dated 30 August 2019. As of August 2026 the eCFR titles 7 CFR Chapter VIII as Agricultural Marketing Service (Federal Grain Inspection Service, Fair Trade Practices Program), Department of Agriculture, and 9 CFR Chapter II as Agricultural Marketing Service (Fair Trade Practices Program), Department of Agriculture. Those headings are themselves in motion: USDA announced in 2025 that AMS would break up the Fair Trade Practices Program, moving the Packers and Stockyards Division into the Livestock and Poultry Program and PACA oversight into the Specialty Crops Program. If you want to understand how any individual report is constructed, AMS maintains a public Reference Room holding the LPGMN Reporter's Handbook, the commodity glossaries and report overviews including A User's Guide to USDA LMR Cattle Price Reports.

A blank in a USDA report is not a zero and it is not a mistake. AMS applies a confidentiality guideline known as 3/70/20 to livestock reports under Livestock Mandatory Reporting. For a report to be published, at least three reporting entities must provide data at least 50 per cent of the time over the most recent 60-day period; no single reporting entity may provide more than 70 per cent of the data for a report over that period; and no single reporting entity may be the sole reporting entity for a report more than 20 per cent of the time over that period. Thin markets get suppressed rather than published.

In grain, the reverse problem exists. AMS defines a nominal quotation as a price reported in the absence of a cash trade, where the reporter is confident that the nominal price reflects current market value conditions. A number on the page does not prove a bushel changed hands at it. AMS also defines a bid as willingness to buy at a stated price according to specified conditions, and a spot bid as a price willing to be paid for a commodity available for immediate delivery. A bid is an offer to buy, not a settled transaction. Separately, AMS defines price protection as a price discount subtracted from the bid, usually in effect during volatile market activity, and requires that where protection occurs the bids include the protection discounts and the report carries a statement showing the range of discounts taken for each commodity.

AMS's own reporter guidance is unusually blunt about the limits of its numbers. Much of a daily livestock report is a qualitative scale rather than a figure: supply is described as light, moderate or heavy; demand as very good, good, moderate, light or very light; trade activity as active, moderate, slow or inactive; and price trend as higher, firm, steady, weak or lower. Trends are based on bulk prices for the most part, sales outside the normal range usually have little influence on the trend, and it is generally not necessary to use less than a 25 cent fluctuation. The same guidance states that the prices at which livestock or livestock products are sold are not necessarily their value, and that the terms are not synonymous and must not be used interchangeably.

Chicago Board of Trade corn futures, Globex code ZC, are a 5,000 bushel contract quoted in US cents per bushel, with a minimum price fluctuation of one quarter of one cent per bushel, equal to $12.50 per contract. Corn is deliverable, and trading terminates on the business day prior to the 15th day of the contract month. The contract prices one specific grade. Under the schedule in force from March 2019, #2 Yellow is deliverable at contract price, #1 Yellow carries a premium of 1.5 cents per bushel, and #3 Yellow takes a discount of between 2 and 4 cents per bushel depending on broken corn and foreign material and damage grade factors.

The two cattle contracts differ from each other in a way that is often reported backwards. CME Live Cattle futures (LE) are 40,000 pounds quoted in US cents per pound, minimum tick 0.00025 per pound or $10.00, physically deliverable, with trading terminating at 12:00 noon Central Time on the last business day of the contract month. CME Feeder Cattle futures (GF) are 50,000 pounds, minimum tick $12.50, and are financially settled rather than delivered. Trading terminates on the last Thursday of the contract month, except in November, when it is the Thursday before Thanksgiving. Rather than calling for delivery of physical cattle, Feeder Cattle futures cash settle against the CME Feeder Cattle Index, which the rulebook computes over the seven calendar days ending on the day trading terminates, and which CME Group staff calculate using data provided by USDA. Lean Hog futures likewise cash settle to the CME Lean Hog Index. The futures market therefore loops back into AMS reporting.

One practical warning about free quotes. CME Group's product pages carry the line that market data is delayed by at least 10 minutes, which was still the case when we checked on 31 August 2026. If you are watching a fast market on a free web page, you are watching the past. On the other side of the same relationship, AMS defines the CME settlement price it uses in livestock reporting as the midpoint of the trades or the last valid price in the pit between 12:59:30 and 13:00:00 Central Time, including trades, higher bids, lower offers, or a nominal close based on the prior settle if there was no activity. Read that as legacy wording. CME Group closed its agricultural futures pits in July 2015 and its remaining agricultural options pits in 2021, so the half-minute window is now measured on electronic trading, not on a floor.

AMS defines basis in its own grain glossary as the difference between a spot or cash price and a specified futures price. CME puts the same idea in terms of what causes it: in local markets the futures price is adjusted for variables such as freight, handling, storage and quality, as well as supply and demand factors affecting that particular area, and that difference is the basis, calculated as the cash price minus the futures price. A negative basis is called under, a positive basis is called over, and it can be either. CME's framing of what a hedge actually buys is worth keeping in view: by hedging with futures, buyers and sellers are essentially reducing their price risk by assuming basis risk, which is why CME says it is important that hedgers maintain historical basis records in order to make realistic basis expectations.

The extension services put numbers and ownership on that. University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension, in Joshua Kamps and Steven Okonek's grain marketing material, defines basis as the difference between an offered cash price at a specific location and the price of the next futures contract which will mature, notes that at fall harvest the supply of the commodity is largest so you can expect a larger negative basis, lists storage cost, interest, drying and shrink, handling charges and quality deterioration as components, and cautions that basis trends are predictable but not absolute. University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension makes the ownership explicit: individual grain buyers determine and adjust their own basis value depending on local supply and demand, grain quality and the cost of doing business, and UNL recommends that producers maintain their own local historic basis data from area elevators. For a regional picture, Kansas State University's AgManager.info publishes grain basis maps and basis deviation maps for corn, soybeans, wheat and grain sorghum, built from cash prices at 500 to 1,000 locations depending on the crop, collected each Wednesday, interpolated with GIS inverse-distance methods and updated monthly; the deviation maps compare current basis with the three-year average for the same week and location.

Start with what you are comparing. AMS's glossary distinguishes the kinds of buyer you might haul to, and the delivery terms matter as much as the headline number: a to-arrive price includes freight and handling charges delivered to a destination at a specified time, while FOB is the price at place of origin not including transportation charges. Comparing an FOB bid with a to-arrive bid is comparing two different things. For cattle, AMS publishes named local auction reports for feeder and replacement cattle listed by individual sale barn and sale day, Cullman Stockyard in Cullman, Alabama on a Tuesday being one example of the format; the roster of covered states changes, so look up your own state on the AMS index rather than trusting a list in an article. The descriptive comments in those reports map directly to premiums and discounts. AMS notes that cattle marked fleshy or full typically sell at a discount, while gaunt, thin fleshed, fancy, weaned and value added cattle typically sell at a premium, and it defines value added as a combination of source and age verification, all-natural, non-hormone treated, a known vaccination programme, being weaned more than 30 days, or superior genetics. If you sell direct instead, AMS Local and Regional Food Market News publishes farmers market and farmers auction reports for selected locations, national quarterly direct-to-consumer reports for Grass Fed Beef, Grass Fed Lamb and Goat, Pasture Raised Pork and Pasture Raised Poultry, and monthly National Organic Dairy Products Prices; AMS states that coverage is for select locations and that more will be added, so check whether your market is in scope. These same USDA feeds are where YieldAI Global pulls its US market prices from, and every report described in this post is free to anyone who goes to the source.

AMS draws the distinction cleanly for livestock. Base Price is the price paid for livestock before application of any premiums or discounts, expressed in dollars per hundredweight. Net Price is the price paid after application of any premiums or discounts. A discount is defined as an adjustment, expressed in dollars per hundredweight, subtracted from the base price due to weight, quality characteristics, yield characteristics, livestock class, dark cutting, breed, dressing percentage, or other factors. If you sold on a forward contract, AMS defines that as an agreement executed in advance of slaughter under which the base price is established by reference to prices quoted on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, with a Basis Level being the agreed adjustment to that futures price to establish the final price paid.

In grain, the deductions come from a schedule that is not USDA's. AMS defines a discount as a schedule of deductions from the cash price for a commodity grading lower than the base grade, and a premium as a schedule of allowances over the cash price for grading higher. The schedule belongs to the buyer. What USDA does own is the grade itself. The Official U.S. Standards for corn at 7 CFR 810.404 grade on four factors only: test weight, heat-damaged kernels, total damaged kernels, and broken corn and foreign material. U.S. No. 1 requires a minimum 56.0 lb per bushel test weight with maximums of 0.1 per cent heat-damaged kernels, 3.0 per cent total damaged kernels and 2.0 per cent BCFM. No. 2 is 54.0 lb, 0.2, 5.0 and 3.0. No. 3 is 52.0 lb, 0.5, 7.0 and 4.0. No. 4 is 49.0 lb, 1.0, 10.0 and 5.0. No. 5 is 46.0 lb, 3.0, 15.0 and 7.0.

Moisture is not on that list. It is not a grade-determining factor for corn under the federal standards, and neither the grade table nor the definitions at 7 CFR 810.402 set a moisture limit. Every moisture discount and shrink calculation you are charged therefore comes from the buyer's own schedule, not from USDA. Austin Harthoorn and Cory Walters, writing for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center for Agricultural Profitability on 19 September 2022, noted that the moisture level where discounts begin is generally consistent among grain buyers at 15.0 per cent for corn and 13.0 per cent for soybeans, but that the schedules above that level differ: one elevator may charge a flat per bushel fee for each 0.5 moisture point over 15.0 per cent while another charges an increasing fee for each 0.1 point. Shrink converts a wet load into the bushel equivalent had the grain been dried to the base moisture. The numbers vary by elevator, by crop and by year, so ask for the schedule in writing before you haul.

Two further deductions come off before you see the money, and both are set in federal regulation. The beef checkoff at 7 CFR 1260.172 makes each person making payment to a producer for cattle a collecting person who must collect an assessment of one dollar per head of cattle purchased, with a credit of up to 50 cents per head for a producer contributing to a qualified state beef council. The soybean checkoff at 7 CFR 1220.223 is a percentage rather than a flat fee: each first purchaser collects one-half of one per cent of the net market price of the soybeans purchased, with a credit of up to one quarter of one per cent for contributions to a Qualified State Soybean Board. Federal law also sets when the money must arrive. Under 9 CFR 201.43, a packer, market agency or dealer buying livestock for cash must make payment before the close of the next business day following the purchase and transfer of possession, or, for a purchase on a carcass or grade and yield basis, before the close of the first business day following determination of the purchase price. A market agency selling consigned livestock must, before the close of the next business day following the sale, transmit the net proceeds together with a true written account of such sale, showing the number, weight, and price of each kind of animal sold, the date of sale, the commission, yardage, and other lawful charges. That account of sale is where the reported auction price and your cheque are reconciled.

We have explained how the USDA reports are built, what the terms in them mean, and where the deductions come from. We are not your marketing adviser and not your broker, and nothing here is a recommendation about when to sell or whether to hedge.

Contract terms, discount and shrink schedules, and checkoff deductions are between you and your buyer. Confirm those with the buyer directly, and confirm anything report-specific with USDA AMS Market News or your land-grant extension service. Programme authorities, release calendars, agency names and grade schedules change, so check the date on anything you rely on, including this.