USDA AMS Market News - Livestock, Poultry & Grain

It is the number the protein trade actually settles against. Every trading day USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service publishes the wholesale prices, volumes and cut detail behind American meat - the boxed beef cutout that indexes countless contracts, the pork cutout packers hedge against, lamb carcass values, and the cattle, hog and sheep reports underneath them. Its Livestock, Poultry, and Grain Market News Division has kept this tape for a century, issuing thousands of reports a year across wholesale, retail and shipping data.

Mandatory reporting is what makes the series analytically clean: packers report transactions under federal rule, so the numbers reflect reported trades rather than survey estimates. Inside Datadory's catalog of 1,744 datasets across 159 viable industries this is one of 13 primary Packaged Foods & Meats records, scoring 9 out of 10 against a catalog mean of 7.81 - and the only record here reading the wholesale market report-day by report-day. Get a sample of this dataset and real rows arrive before anything recurring.

One report, one day, two row shapes:

# report header - one per report per day
report_title   : National Daily Boxed Beef Cutout & Boxed Beef Cuts
               : - Negotiated Sales - PM (PDF) (LM_XB403)
slug_name      : AMS_2453            slug_id: 2453
report_date    : 08/20/2026          published_date: 08/20/2026 14:44:31
office_name    : Des Moines, IA      market_type: Direct Livestock - LMR Beef

# section row - the economics, one named slice per row
reportSection          : Current Cutout Values
choice_600_900_current : 389.93     # dollars per cwt
select_600_900_current : 363.74     # dollars per cwt

# restatements travel as their own rows, never silent edits
is_correction          : false      # true marks a correction record

The header row identifies who said what, when - report code, market family, issuing office, release timestamp to the second. Section rows carry the economics, one named slice per row: Current Cutout Values holds the day's Choice and Select composites, Change From Prior Day holds the move, and Composite Primal Values, Current Volume, Choice Cuts and Ground Beef hold the rest of the carcass. Because every row keeps its section label, nothing arrives buried in report prose.

Eleven documented fields define the record set, each carrying a type, definition and worked example, with field confidence marked verified against captured reports. Four identify the observation (slug_id, slug_name, report_title, report_date); one stamps the release (published_date); one labels the slice (reportSection); two carry the headline values (choice_600_900_current, select_600_900_current); and three attribute it - issuing office, market family and a correction flag that turns restatements into data rather than surprises.

Additional fields on request: the cut-level detail beneath the headline composites - composite primal values, current and prior-day volumes, choice cuts, ground beef and trimmings sections, and change-from-prior-day columns - folds into your extract pinned to exact column names when the sample is cut.

Geography - United States at three altitudes: national composite reports, regional breakouts such as the Central and National sections, and reports signed by individual AMS field offices. One schema carries all three, so a national read and its regional texture never need reconciling.

Temporal - the mandatory-reporting archive reaches back to 1999, and the active set runs daily series such as the boxed beef cutout and pork FOB plant reports alongside weekly comprehensive and specialty rollups. Report dates and release timestamps ride on every row, so any window reconstructs exactly rather than approximately.

Granularity - one record per report per day or week, exploded into named sections down to primal-level values. You quote the cutout and its parts from the same dictionary, which is the difference between analysis and archaeology.

Against the wider catalog - average quality score 7.81 across all 1,744 datasets - this slice holds 9/10, carried by field definitions verified against captured reports and a fully populated coverage profile.

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

Channel and cadence are settings, not projects. Files suit the analyst versioning the full mandatory archive beside their own procurement ledgers. Structured feeds suit dashboards that want the freshest cutout the moment it lands. Warehouse delivery suits teams running margin models in SQL against their own sales tables. Every delivery ships the field dictionary above, the captured sample rows and a coverage profile mapped to the reports, sections and date windows you name - so the schema in the sample is the schema you ship against. Release timestamps and correction flags travel with every row either way.

1. Margin-cycle investors pair the daily cutout with monthly spread series and date exactly when wholesale direction turned (investors quants use cases).
2. Procurement and commodity managers anchor pork and beef buying on cutout and primal values instead of trader anecdotes.
3. Competitive-intel teams read rivals' input costs off the same composite everyone prices against (competitive intel product teams use cases).
4. Quantitative researchers build forecasting features from section-labeled rows with release timestamps and correction flags attached (data scientists use cases).
5. Consultants and category analysts benchmark pass-through from wholesale to menu and shelf on the series the industry itself cites (market researchers use cases).
6. Reporters and academics cite the federal record for protein price moves, corrections and all.

Investors and quant researchers lead: a century-old price series with modern section structure is rare material for protein factor work. Data scientists and ML engineers get typed, section-labeled rows whose release timestamps make point-in-time modeling honest. Competitive-intel and product teams inherit an input-cost signal nobody can dispute. Sales and growth teams walk into pricing conversations holding the same benchmark their buyer just read. Journalists, academics and students gain quotable numbers with offices, dates and corrections attached.

Within Packaged Foods & Meats this record owns today's wholesale price. Its neighbors own different clocks. The USDA ERS Meat Price Spreads settle the daily prints into fifty years of monthly farm-through-retail margins. USDA FAS GATS adds the export demand side at HS-10-by-partner-by-month. USDA NASS Quick Stats supplies the production and inventory counts behind the animals being priced. openFDA Food Enforcement covers the safety-and-recall lens on the same products - the head-to-head sets the two apart. Run the daily tape for timing and the monthly series for structure; that combination is the standard protein stack. See the best Packaged Foods & Meats datasets ranking.