USDA Livestock Market Price Comparison — which sale barn pays more, this week

An independent tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by USDA or the Agricultural Marketing Service. USDA Market News reports are US government works (17 U.S.C. §105) and AMS's own privacy statement describes information on its site as "considered public information and may be distributed or copied." This Actor reads AMS's MARS API and reports what it returns, reshaped into a cross-market comparison.

No scraper. This Actor never touches a USDA web page's HTML. Its data comes from AMS's MARS API (marsapi.ams.usda.gov), refreshed on a schedule and bundled into this Actor at build time.

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Why this exists

No single AMS report tells you whether the sale barn down the road is paying more for 600-650 lb feeder steers than the one three counties over. Each livestock-auction report only covers its own market, on its own reporting schedule — one stockyard may report several times a week, another only a few dozen times a year. Answering "who pays more, right now, for this class of cattle" means pulling several markets' full histories and reconciling them onto one comparison, on each market's own recent cadence rather than a shared calendar.

v1 covers 6 livestock-auction markets — Unionville Livestock Market (MO), Oklahoma National Stockyards (OK), Huss Livestock (NE), Frisco City Stockyards (AL), Athens Regional Stockyard (TN), and Lexington Livestock Auction (KY) — for Feeder Cattle, Steers or Heifers, Per Cwt, across the common 400-900 lb weight breaks. These are the markets and the commodity/ class/price-unit slice found to report densely and consistently enough across all six to support a real 8-report-date comparison; four other sampled markets (Clovis Livestock Auction NM, Centennial CO, Central Plains Stockyards IA, Torrington Livestock Commission WY) do not report this combination often enough in a trailing 120-day window and are not yet covered.

What you give it

• market_report_slugs — which of the 6 covered markets to compare (their AMS report slug ids).
• commodity, animal_class, weight_break_low, weight_break_high, price_unit — the ONE comparison group to rank markets against (v1: Feeder Cattle, Steers/Heifers, common weight breaks, Per Cwt).

What comes back

One row per requested market: its rank (1 = paying the most, right now, for the requested group), its recent average price, how many reports fed that average, and the date window they span. A market with no matching recent data still gets a row — charged: false with a plain-English not_charged_reason — never a silent gap.

Billing

Charged per market row delivered where that market has at least one matching, dated price in its own recent reporting window (market-ranking-row-delivered). A market with no comparable data in the requested group is delivered free, with a reason.

Data freshness

The comparison is only as current as the last scheduled refresh. Each market's own 8 most recent report dates for the requested group are kept; older history falls out of the comparison window on the next refresh.