The U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issues a monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimate (WASDE) report which includes projections for the Supply and Demand for various U. S. crops. The data in the reports indicates (amongst other things) projected scarcity of crop supplies - which affects price movements on the commodity markets. (Python Kernel to follow shortly.)

Content

The USDA data was acquired by downloading all the historical WASDE reports starting in May2007 through Mar2018. (A python script aggregated the data and output the CSV files in this dataset.)

The best way to understand the many columns of data is to look at a single WASDE report and visit the official website with historical reports - but it can be useful to have the projections arranged by date as presented here. I have generated corresponding files for other crops - if they would be of interest to others I'd be happy to add them.

The price data has been scraped from a public website - and rearranged for ease of use.

At any one time there are multiple commodity contracts open and the "nearby" is the contract that will be the first to expire. The "nearby" files show the close price of the nearby contract during the period Feb2008 through Dec2017. Included are files for two separate contracts - SoybeansJul14 and CornJul14: along with Open, High, Low, Close, Volume and OpenInterest, the last column indicates Total Open Interest across all soybean (and respectively corn) contracts on that date.

Acknowledgements

The WASDE data is extracted from (public domain) monthly reports produced by the U. S. Department of Agriculture.

Banner Photo by Henry Be on Unsplash