Work · Market data
USDA market prices, plainly
USDA publishes what’s paid for beef, pork, cattle and refrigerated freight every day, but mostly as PDFs or raw rows in a datamart. These boards take those reports and turn them into pages you can read and search, with the full history since 2020 and everything free to download.
- Choice beef
- $3.67 −$1.72
- Pork cutout
- $0.71 −$1.76
- Live steers
- $227.08 +$2.89
The pages update every morning and when USDA posts new prices. This updates them now, for everyone (once an hour).
The boards
| Board | Latest | What’s in it | USDA report |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boxed beef | Choice $3.67, Thu, Oct 29 | The Choice and Select cutout, 7 primals and 58 cut pages, every business day since Jan 2, 2020 | LM_XB403, daily |
| Pork | Cutout $0.71, Thu, Oct 29 | The carcass cutout, 6 primals and 157 cut pages, every business day since Jan 2, 2020 | LM_PK602, daily |
| Fed cattle | Live $227.08, week of Oct 19 to Oct 25, 2026 | The 5-area market and 7 regions, live and dressed, every week since 2020, plus the daily report | LM_CT150, CT154, CT156–158, CT100 |
| Reefer truck rates | Week of Oct 26, 2026 | Weekly produce freight rates, lane by lane, and diesel | Truck Rate report (2375), weekly |
What sets them apart
- Every item has its own page, with today’s price, whether it’s high or low against the past year, its history since 2020 and its usual seasonal swing.
- Nothing is made up. A day with no sales is left blank, never zero; seasons are measured against each year’s own average, so inflation doesn’t pass for a season.
- Tools that use the page’s own numbers: find a cut, budget a buy, check a quote, the cost after trimming, and whether to sell cattle live or in the beef.
- Everything downloads, as CSV and JSON, free and with no key. The data is USDA’s and in the public domain.
- In English and Spanish, with the names used in Mexico.
How they’re built
USDA keeps every report and serves them with no key, so nothing here keeps a second copy. At least once a day a GitHub Action reads back the CSVs already published and asks USDA only for what’s new, then rebuilds every board and page. A free Cloudflare Worker watches for the afternoon beef and pork reports so they show up within half an hour. Visiting the pages costs nothing to run.
Source: USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, Livestock, Poultry and Grain Market News and Specialty Crops Market News. The numbers are theirs; any mistakes in presenting them are mine.