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USDA RELEASES ONLINE DASHBOARD TRACKING FERTILIZER PRICES, DATA


by Tammie Sloup, Illinois Farm Bureau's FarmWeekNow.com

A new online dashboard brings together a variety of regularly updated fertilizer transportation data.

USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service recently launched the Fertilizer Transportation Dashboard to help build resilience in the agrifood supply chain by providing needed visibility into transportation markets through publicly available data.

The dashboard offers indicators including fertilizer production, inventory and disappearance data for each primary nutrient (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium); U.S. fertilizer imports and fertilizer price data by region for key fertilizer commodities (ammonia, urea, UAN, DAP, MAP, and potash).

To view the dashboard click here.

The dashboard also includes rail volume and shipment characteristics from the Surface Transportation Board's public-use carload waybill sample, weekly rail carloads of fertilizer, a collection of rail tariff rates for key routes by fertilizer commodity and monthly barge volumes for key locks on the Mississippi River System.

Fertilizer costs account for 21% of total corn production costs, 19% for wheat and 8% for soybeans.

Within the United States, fertilizer supplies rely on an interconnected system of barge, rail, pipeline and truck. According to The Fertilizer Institute, 63% of fertilizer moves by rail, 17% by barge, 15% by truck and 5% moves by pipeline. (Only ammonia is transported by pipeline)

According to the fertilizer dashboard, nitrogen fertilizer production in the United States approximately doubled between 2010 and 2020. This significant growth has been attributed to two changes: increased corn demand for ethanol production and reduced prices for natural gas (the principal feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer production). Increased domestic nitrogen production has led to reduced nitrogen imports.

Along with the dashboard, USDA also launched the Pacific Northwest Barge Rate Data Series. Both are available on the Agricultural Transportation Open Data Platform, AgTransport, at agtransport.usda.gov.

The series is the first of its kind to provide grain barge rates for the Columbia-Snake River System, which moves, on average, roughly 31 million tons of grain per year, with wheat and soybeans making up about 67% of all grain shipped. Along with the weekly spot rate data published for downbound grain barges along the Mississippi River System, the expanded coverage of the new barge rate data series will provide broader visibility into the grain transportation market, and help monitor market anomalies, such as transportation disruptions.


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