About
About Know Your Onions
The USDA onion shipping-point number, read plainly by origin, variety and pack, with no advice attached.
What this is
Know Your Onions is a weekly brief plus a set of always-current data pages on the US onion market: USDA shipping-point FOB prices by growing origin, variety and pack, the volumes shipped and crossed from Mexico, Peru and Canada, and a Monday board of what moved. It is built for the people who price onions for a living: growers, shippers, brokers, and produce buyers and wholesale desks who need the FOB number without reading the raw USDA reports line by line.
Who writes it
Know Your Onions is published by Alex Willen. The data pages are generated from the public USDA record on a fixed schedule; the weekly brief reads what moved and writes it up in plain English. Every hard number on every page traces back to the USDA report that published it.
Where the numbers come from
Everything comes from the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service: the shipping-point (FOB) reports that are the wedge of this site, the movement reports that carry shipped and imported volumes, the terminal-market reports, and the national retail-ad report. The prices are reported exactly as USDA publishes them, as a mostly range or a low-high range with the pack named, never flattened to a single invented number. Nothing here is estimated, interpolated or sourced from a private data vendor.
How often it updates
USDA publishes shipping-point reports most business days, mid-afternoon Eastern. The pipeline pulls a trailing window of reports and the pages update, with the Monday brief reading the prior week. Onion origins rotate through the year, so an origin outside its season simply has no fresh quote; that is rotation, not a gap. Every figure is dated to its own report date, and every page carries a visible Last updated stamp.
What we will and will not do
We report public USDA data and attribute every hard number to it. We do not forecast prices, movement, or crop transitions. We never tell a reader what to buy, sell, or contract for, in any phrasing. A price move in this market is neither good nor bad on its face; it matters to buyers and sellers in opposite ways, and we report the direction and size of it plainly. We are not trading, contracting, legal or financial advice; decisions are yours to make with your own market judgment and the primary data.
New here? Start with how to read this, or see the exact math behind every comparison on the methodology page.