Refrigerated Truck Rate Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

Refrigerated truck rate data is the weekly spot price a shipper pays to move a temperature-controlled truckload of perishable freight down a specific lane, paired with a measure of how easy trucks were to find that week. In the public record this is one row per origin shipping area, destination market, shipment distance and commodity group per week. The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service publishes it on its AgTransport platform (agtransport.usda.gov), built from AMS Market News Specialty Crops Program reports. The refrigerated series holds 206,201 rows as of August 2026 and covers roughly 1,256 distinct commodity strings, which makes it the only public lane-level source of produce and reefer truck rates.

Each observation carries eight working fields: the week ending date, the AMS region of the origin, the origin shipping area itself (down to descriptions like "IMPERIAL, COACHELLA VALLEYS CA"), the destination market city, the shipment distance in miles, the quoted commodity list, three dollar figures (weeklow, weekhigh, midpoint) and a derived rate-per-mile. A numeric availability score completes the row: 1 means shortage, 2 slight shortage, 3 adequate, 4 slight surplus and 5 surplus.

No integration key is required anywhere in that sequence. The main operational caution is vintage: the weekly Socrata dataset and the quarterly Agricultural Refrigerated Truck Quarterly (AgRTQ) PDF report are different vintages, so decide which is authoritative for a given week before you cite it.