How this is built
Methodology
What data The Russet Report pulls, where it comes from, and how often it refreshes.
What we pull, and from where
Everything on this site comes off the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service reporting API. Four report families:
- the shipping point (FOB) reports, which price potatoes at the origin district by pack, cultivar, grade, size and carton count, published each business day a district is quoting,
- the movement reports, the shipped and Canadian border-crossing volumes in hundredweight,
- the terminal-market reports, wholesale prices at the destination markets,
- and the national retail-ad report, the weekly count of grocery ads.
How often
The pull runs weekly, ahead of the Friday brief, and covers a trailing window of business-day quotes, so a missed run backfills on the next one. A district that is not quoting simply shows no new reading, and its pages say so rather than showing an estimate. Every data page carries two dates: "data through" is the newest reading in the data itself, and "page updated" is when the page was last rebuilt.
For how to read the numbers once they are in front of you, see how to read this.
Republishing our charts and statistics
The charts and statistics on The Russet Report are free to republish. Use them in an article, a report, a class, a presentation, or a post — you do not need to ask us first. We ask one thing in return: credit The Russet Report with a visible link back to the page you took the figure or chart from, and keep that link live.
Every chart has an Embed chart button with a snippet you can paste straight into a web page. Because it points at the live image, the chart you embed today keeps updating itself as new data lands — you never have to swap in a fresh screenshot. Every data page, guide, and issue has a Cite button that hands you a ready-made citation line, including the date the data runs through. If you are quoting a number, keep that date: it is what tells your reader how current the figure is.