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Boxed Beef Cutout Price Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

Datadory delivers boxed beef cutout price data covering comprehensive field definitions, entity mappings, and historical time series — structured for direct analytics and delivered on demand.

1,744 datasets. Pick your catch.

What fields does the daily boxed beef report carry?

Each report splits into named sections - Summary, Current Cutout Values, Change From Prior Day, Composite Primal Values, Current Volume, Choice Cuts, Ground Beef - so a single day's pull returns levels and deltas together. The headline values are dollars per hundredweight (cwt) for 600-900 lb carcasses. On the August 20, 2026 report, the current Choice cutout (field choice_600_900_current) read 389.93 USD/cwt and the Select cutout 363.74 USD/cwt - a 26.19 dollar Choice-over-Select premium that grade-spread traders track directly.

Metadata rides along with every record: slug_name AMS_2453 identifies the report inside the API, published_date stamps the release (08/20/2026 14:44:31), report_date carries the market day the values apply to, office_name shows the issuing desk (Des Moines, IA), market_type reads Direct Livestock - LMR Beef, and an is_correction flag marks amended prints. That last field matters operationally: pipelines that overwrite rather than append can silently drop corrections unless they re-query recent days.

Which cutout reports exist, and how often do they publish?

AMS publishes reports intraday, with the afternoon releases landing around 14:30-15:00 ET, and the API listing exposed 151 active LMR report slugs when Datadory verified it in August 2026. The table below inventories the cutout family you can query by slug, plus the monthly federal series that stretches the wholesale story back before mandatory reporting existed.

How far back does boxed beef cutout history go?

Mandatory reporting history reaches back to 1999 through the DataMart and historical files, so more than two decades of daily cutouts are reachable programmatically with the report_year range query above. Before that, the daily record thins out - and the USDA ERS Meat Price Spreads dataset is the substitute: monthly wholesale values for Choice beef (plus pork and broilers) from 1970 to present, with 20 distinct measures in a roughly 1.12 MB CSV covering farm value, byproduct value, wholesale value, retail value and farmer share. Its wholesale leg is built from AMS livestock reports and its retail leg from BLS, and the trade-off is granularity - national monthly averages only, no regional detail.

To look forward instead of backward, USDA ERS Food Price Outlook issues monthly CPI and PPI forecasts up to 18 months ahead, with Beef and veal broken out as its own category among roughly 22 CPI item categories per vintage, annual percent-change tables spanning 1974-2025 and recent change tables covering 2024-2027.

Pick up where this leaves off

Every one of these ships with sample rows before you commit to anything.

Packaged Foods & Meats United States - national composites, regional breakouts and…

USDA AMS Market News - Livestock, Poultry & Grain

slug_id · slug_name · report_title …+5 more

Packaged Foods & Meats United States, national averages

USDA ERS Meat Price Spreads

Data_Item

Packaged Foods & Meats United States, national level

USDA ERS Food Price Outlook

Packaged Foods & Meats United States - national, state, county

USDA NASS Quick Stats

LOAD_TIME

Packaged Foods & Meats US trade with ~200 partner countries

USDA FAS Global Agricultural Trade System (GATS)

9 documented fields per row · definitions verified …+6 more

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Questions worth asking

Where can I find daily boxed beef cutout prices?

USDA AMS Market News publishes them in the National Daily Boxed Beef Cutout & Boxed Beef Cuts report (LM_XB403), issued each business afternoon around 14:30-15:00 ET. Pull it from the free LMPR JSON API - slug AMS_2453 - or read the PDF in the file repository. On August 20, 2026 the Choice cutout read 389.93 USD/cwt.

Is there an API for boxed beef cutout data?

Yes. The LMPR DataMart serves a JSON REST API at mpr.datamart.ams.usda.gov/services/v1.1/reports/ with no key required. The listing exposes 151 active report slugs, and a date query such as report_date=08/20/2026 with allSections=True returns a full day's cutout report, including prior-day change and primal values.

How far back does boxed beef cutout data go?

Daily mandatory reporting reaches back to 1999 via the DataMart and historical files. For earlier decades, USDA ERS Meat Price Spreads supplies monthly wholesale values for Choice beef from 1970 to present, with 20 measures including farm value, byproduct value, farmer share and the farm-to-wholesale spread in a single CSV.

What was the most recent boxed beef cutout value?

On the August 20, 2026 daily report, the Choice boxed beef cutout for 600-900 lb carcasses stood at 389.93 USD per cwt and Select at 363.74 USD per cwt - a 26.19 dollar premium. The report was published at 14:44:31 ET by the Des Moines, IA office under slug AMS_2453.