How our numbers work
Every price on Fresh Start Report comes from the USDA. We don’t survey anyone, estimate prices, or adjust what USDA reports. What we add is arithmetic and arrangement. This page shows you exactly what that arithmetic is, so you can check our work.
Where the prices come from
USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service publishes shipping-point reports through Market News. They show what first handlers are getting, FOB shipping point, by commodity, package, size and growing district. We pull those reports for every shipping point currently in production, including Mexico crossings through Nogales, Otay Mesa and Texas.
The price we chart
USDA reports two ranges. The mostly range is where most sales happened. The full low–highrange is everything reported. For each shipping point, each report day, we take every row USDA published for your selection and combine them into one range, from the lowest mostly low to the highest mostly high. We chart the midpoint of that range. When USDA gives no mostly range, we use the midpoint of the full low–high range instead. When USDA publishes only one end of a range, that single figure is the price. When a day has several of those single figures, usually one per size, we chart the midpoint between the lowest and the highest of them.
Shipping-point reports come out on weekdays, so our charts run on weekdays only.
One line per shipping point
On the shipping-point chart, each line is one district, so you can see the spread between growing areas side by side. A dollar cheaper in one district may not be cheaper once freight is in. That’s why we show every shipping point instead of burying them in one number.
We never invent a price for a day USDA didn’t report. A short gap, such as a holiday week, is drawn as a straight line between the last reported price and the next. When a shipping point goes more than ten days without a report, its line breaks, and on the National FOB chart the gap is shaded and labelled “No reported price”.
National FOB, on a 7-day moving average
The National FOB line takes the charted price from every shipping point reporting that day and averages them, with each shipping point counting equally. It then smooths the result: each day’s figure is the average of that day and the six calendar days before it, counting only the days with a report, which is usually five. Days with no report are skipped, never filled in. The National line always covers every shipping point, even when you’ve narrowed the shipping-point chart to a few, and it follows your variety, size, package and grade choices.
Same date, three years
The snapshot cards put the latest report next to the same calendar date in each of the previous two years. They use their own arithmetic, not the National FOB line. For each shipping point we take its most recent report on that date or in the four days before it; a shipping point with nothing in that window is left out. Each shipping point’s price is the average of its rows on that day. We then average across shipping points, weighting each one by the volume it shipped over the previous two weeks, so a point moving 500 loads counts for more than one moving 5. If USDA’s latest report is more than four weekdays old, the cards go blank rather than show last season as now. That tells you at a glance whether the market is running high, low, or where the season says it should be.
Weather where it’s grown
Each shipping point is matched to the growing area that feeds it, one or two towns where the crop is grown. Import ports are matched to the port itself, since there is no single foreign growing area behind them. Each card shows yesterday, today and the next two days, with the high, the low and the sky. Weather data comes from Open-Meteo.
The evening digest
The evening email shows the mostly low–high range across every reporting district in each of your saved views. It compares tonight’s figures against the previous report day, and against the report seven days earlier (or the latest one before it, when there wasn’t one).
What we don’t do
- We don’t estimate, model or forecast prices.
- We don’t add freight. Prices are FOB shipping point, so you can run your own freight math.
- We don’t report delivered or terminal-market prices on the charts.
Who’s behind it
Fresh Start Report was built by Sasha and Tulley, two produce salesmen who use it every morning before they sell for their growers. Meet them →
Questions about a number? Email info@freshstartreport.com and one of us will answer.
Market data sourced from the USDA. Weather data by Open-Meteo.com.