USDA ERS Fertilizer Use and Price

The measurement layer beneath six decades of American input economics. Fertilizer Use and Price is the USDA Economic Research Service's reference consolidation of long-run US fertilizer statistics: a single volume of 32 tables plus a contents tab, each family running as deep as its own record allows. Tables 1 through 6 carry national consumption - primary nutrients (nitrogen, phosphate, potash), the split between single- and multiple-nutrient materials, selected nitrogen materials, named phosphate and potash products, and secondary and micronutrient sources including natural organic materials. Table 2 attributes plant nutrient use across corn, cotton, soybeans and wheat from 1964.

Tables 9 through 32 then go state-by-state on application behaviour for those four crops: for each crop and each of the three nutrients, one table reports the percent of acreage receiving the nutrient and another reports pounds applied per fertilized acre. Table 7 holds average US farm prices per material and Table 8 carries wholesale price indexes. It scores 9/10 in our catalog against a 7.81 mean - see how the fertilizers & agricultural chemicals slice ranks, or get a sample of this dataset.

Flat and immediately readable once the table context is attached - one table family per block, values verbatim:

table: 1 - U.S. consumption of plant nutrients            year ending June 30: 2015
nitrogen N: 13009.7   phosphate P2O5: 4266.5   potash K2O: 4744.5   total: 22020.7   ('000 short tons)

table: 1 - U.S. consumption of plant nutrients            year ending June 30: 1960
nitrogen N: 2738.0    phosphate P2O5: 2572.4   potash K2O: 2153.3   total: 7463.7

table: 2 - Estimated U.S. plant nutrient use by crops     year: 1964
nitrogen on corn: 1622.54    on cotton: 394.11    on soybeans: 15.54    on wheat: 353.24

table: 9 - Percent of corn acreage receiving nitrogen      state: Alabama   year: 1964
percent of acreage receiving nitrogen: 99.0

table: 7 - Average U.S. farm prices of selected fertilizers   month: Apr. 1960
anhydrous ammonia: $141.00 per short ton    urea (44-46% N): $117.00 per short ton

Read together, the dataset's two registers appear at once. National tonnage nearly tripled between 1960 and 2015 - 7,463.7 to 22,020.7 thousand short tons of primary nutrients - while the Alabama corn row shows the behavioural half: 99 percent of the state's corn acreage received nitrogen in the first surveyed year. The April 1960 price row anchors the cost register, anhydrous ammonia at 141 dollars per short ton. Request a sample and the rows come back shaped to your crops, states and years.

Nine documented fields describe the reference, and the honest headline is that the schema shifts by family. Consumption tables key on the fertilizer year ending June 30 and report tonnages in thousands of short tons with share-of-total percentages alongside. The crop tables swap the year for a state-and-crop key and carry the two application measures - Percent of acreage receiving [nutrient] and Rate per fertilized acre receiving [nutrient] - which together separate adoption from intensity. The price tables list fertilizer materials down the rows with dollars per short ton in the cells.

The dictionary below covers all three families. Product-level breakouts confirmed in the corpus fold out under additional fields on request rather than being promised blind.

Geography - United States national totals throughout, plus surveyed producing states for the four crop families. The state panels stand in for nearly the whole crop footprint: about 93 percent of planted corn acres, 96 percent of soybeans, 89 percent of cotton and 85 percent of winter wheat, so state-level work rests on near-complete coverage of each crop's acres.

Temporal - national consumption runs 1960 through 2015 on fertilizer years ending June 30. Estimated plant nutrient use by crop runs 1964 through 2018. Corn and soybean application tables reach 2018 while the cotton and wheat waves stand at 2017. Farm prices run through 2014 and wholesale price indexes through 2018 - every series has its own horizon, and every trend should be read against it.

Granularity - annual throughout, keyed by nutrient, product, crop and surveyed state. Six decades deep on the national series, which is why trend work rather than spot quotes is this record's natural mode. See how it compares across the best fertilizers & agricultural chemicals datasets.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

Pick the channel your team already works in and the cadence your models want; the field dictionary above travels unchanged through all three. Rows arrive flattened out of the 32-table structure with nutrient, crop, state and year already normalized, so joins against yield, acreage or commodity-price series need no header archaeology first.

Every delivery ships the full dictionary, the sample rows and the coverage profile mapped to the crops and years you named - and a sample comes first regardless of channel.

• Long-run demand baselines - sixty-plus years of national nutrient consumption frame any argument about US demand maturity, substitution or structural decline; see our market researchers use cases page.
• Application benchmarking by state - percent of acreage treated and pounds per fertilized acre put a grower's programme against the measured distribution for the identical crop; see our data scientists use cases page.
• Input-cost history - farm prices per material and wholesale price indexes document cost across multiple price cycles, the defensible backdrop for producer margin work.
• Crop-mix intensity analysis - the crop split shows where the nitrogen actually goes, corn against soybeans against cotton and wheat, year by year.
• Feature engineering and backtests - a six-decade annual panel serves models that need pre-2000 history most commercial feeds never carried; see our investors quants use cases page.
• Citation-grade sourcing - a federal statistical record compiled from AAPFCO, The Fertilizer Institute and NASS survey programs; see our journalists academics use cases page.

Market researchers and consultants get the canonical national series behind every US fertilizer market study, with state-level application detail for regional colour. Data scientists and ML engineers get a six-decade panel that reshapes into features on crop, state, year and nutrient keys once the multi-row headers are handled - which we handle. Investors and quant researchers contextualise ag-input exposure with consumption and price-index history reaching back to 1960, eyes open about where the price tables stop. Journalists, academics and students anchor reporting and research on nutrient pollution, input costs and farming practice to the government's own record. Competitive intelligence teams read adoption and intensity by state as the baseline any precision-agriculture pitch has to beat. Sales and growth teams rank territories by which of the four crops dominate there and how heavily they are dressed.

Because the honest test is fit, not description. A sample comes back cut to the slice you name - nitrogen consumption since 1970 beside corn application rates for the Corn Belt states, farm prices per material for a chosen window, the full state panel for one crop-year - with the dictionary and examples visible so verification happens before anything is wired in. If your question is Canadian supply rather than American use, see the head-to-head with Statistics Canada - Fertilizer shipments; if it is global breadth, compare against FAOSTAT - Fertilizers by Nutrient. Otherwise, get a sample of this dataset scoped to your crops.