How to read a USDA shipping point report

A USDA shipping point report is the daily record of what produce actually sold for at the shipping point, the packing shed or district where the onions were graded, bagged and loaded. USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service runs it through Market News, a price-reporting service that has published free, unbiased farm-commodity prices for more than a century. This site is built on the onion shipping-point reports, so this guide doubles as the methodology page.

Who collects the numbers, and how

The prices are not scraped off invoices or modeled. Market News reporters gather them by contacting the people who traded the onions, the shippers and the buyers, mostly by phone, and confirming what real lots sold for that day. They record price, volume, quality and condition, then publish the range. Because it is a survey of confirmed sales, a shipping-point price is a market fact, not an asking price. A shipper's hoped-for number never reaches the report unless onions actually changed hands at it.

Shipping point, not the grocery store

The shipping point is the origin: the district where the crop was packed and loaded onto the truck. USDA groups nearby shippers into a district, so "Idaho and Malheur County Oregon" or "Vidalia District Georgia" is one reporting district with several packers inside it. This is a different animal from a terminal-market report, which prices onions after they have already shipped into a wholesale market in a consuming city. Shipping-point prices run lower, because they carry no freight yet. Read a shipping-point number as the price at the origin dock.

The anatomy of a line

Every onion line stacks the same fields. First the origin and district. Then the variety, yellow, red, white or a marked-sweet type. Then the pack, a 50-lb sack, a 25-lb sack or a 40-lb carton. Then the size, medium, jumbo, colossal or super colossal. Then the grade, usually U.S. One or ungraded. Only then the price, published as a low-high range and, where enough sales support it, a narrower mostly range. Change any one of those fields and you are looking at a different product with a different price. A jumbo 50-lb sack and a medium 25-lb sack out of the same shed are two separate quotes.

Read "mostly" first

The number to read is mostly. The full low-high range spans every confirmed sale, including the odd lot that traded cheap to clear a shed or rich for a special order. The mostly range is the tighter band where most of the volume actually changed hands, so it is the truer read on the market. Where USDA publishes a mostly range, that is the one this site charts and quotes. Where it publishes only a low-high, that is what we show, and the page says so.

Worked example: one line off the board

Take the board above, the week's biggest FOB moves. Read one row across. The first column names the origin and pack, an origin, a variety, a size and a pack, exactly the stacked fields from a report line. The middle column is the USDA range for the week, quoted the way USDA published it, as a mostly range with the pack attached. The last column is the week-over-week move in dollars per pack. That is a full shipping-point quote in plain English: this origin, this pack, sold in this range this week, up or down this much from last week.

Know Your Onions reports these prices as USDA publishes them. We do not forecast where a price is going, and we never quote a single made-up number in place of the range USDA actually printed.