🌾 USDA Market News Scraper - Livestock, Grain & Commodity Prices

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-05

Whether you're a commodities trader tracking daily prices, a rancher monitoring livestock markets, or an analyst studying agricultural trends, this tool makes it easy to collect structured market data from the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS).

The USDA Market News Scraper collects official commodity price reports from the USDA AMS Market News system. Extract beef, cattle, pork, swine, lamb, and dairy price data with full report metadata, market locations, price ranges, trends, and historical data going back years.

✨ What Does It Do

• 🐄 Livestock prices - collect beef, cattle, pork, swine, and lamb price reports from official USDA data
• 🥛 Dairy data - extract dairy market reports including cheese, butter, milk, and whey prices
• 📅 Historical data - fetch price data for any date range going back years
• 🏢 Market locations - get office names, cities, states, and market location details for every report
• 📈 Trends & narratives - capture market trend indicators and analyst narratives
• 🔍 Keyword filtering - search report titles for specific commodities like "boxed beef", "slaughter", or "hog"

🔧 Input

• Max Items - how many records to collect (free users get 10 items, paid users up to 1,000,000)
• Report Type - filter by commodity type: beef, cattle, pork, swine, lamb, dairy, or all
• Keyword Filter - filter report titles by keyword (e.g., "boxed beef", "slaughter", "hog")
• Date From - fetch data starting from this date (MM/DD/YYYY format)
• Date To - fetch data up to this date (MM/DD/YYYY format)

{
    "reportType": "cattle",
    "keyword": "slaughter",
    "maxItems": 50,
    "dateFrom": "03/01/2026",
    "dateTo": "04/07/2026"
}

📊 Output

Each record includes report metadata, market location, pricing fields, and trend data. Download as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

📌 Field	📄 Description
📋 reportTitle	Official USDA report title
🏷️ slugName	Report slug identifier
🔢 slugId	Numeric report ID
🐄 marketType	Market type (e.g., Direct Livestock - LMR Beef)
📊 marketTypeCategory	Market type category
🏢 officeName	USDA office issuing the report
🏙️ officeCity	Office city location
🗺️ officeState	Office state location
📍 marketLocationName	Market location name
📅 reportDate	Date of the report data
📅 publishedDate	Date the report was published
📈 trend	Market trend indicator
📝 narrative	Analyst market narrative
🔄 isCorrection	Whether this is a correction to a prior report

{
    "reportTitle": "National Daily Direct Hog Prior Day Report - Slaughtered Swine",
    "slugName": "LM_HG200",
    "slugId": "3458",
    "marketType": "Direct Livestock - LMR Pork",
    "marketTypeCategory": "Pork",
    "officeName": "Des Moines",
    "officeCode": "DM",
    "officeCity": "Des Moines",
    "officeState": "IA",
    "marketLocationName": "National",
    "marketLocationCity": "",
    "marketLocationState": "",
    "reportDate": "04/04/2026",
    "publishedDate": "04/07/2026",
    "trend": null,
    "narrative": null,
    "isCorrection": null,
    "sections": ["Barrows and Gilts"],
    "purchase_type": "Negotiated (carcass basis)",
    "head_count": "2,187",
    "price_low": "88.00",
    "price_high": "90.00",
    "weighted_average": "89.25",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-04-07T12:00:00.000Z"
}

💎 Why Choose the USDA Market News Scraper?

Feature	Our Tool	Manual USDA Portal
Batch collection	✅ Up to 1M records	❌ Browse one report at a time
Multiple commodities	✅ Beef, cattle, pork, lamb, dairy	⚠️ Navigate each separately
Historical data	✅ Custom date ranges	⚠️ Limited date filtering
Structured output	✅ JSON, CSV, Excel	❌ PDF/HTML reports only
Automated scheduling	✅ Daily/weekly monitoring	❌ Manual visits
Keyword search	✅ Filter by report title	⚠️ Browse through catalog

📋 How to Use

1. Sign Up - Create a free account w/ $5 credit
2. Configure - choose your report type, add keyword filters, and set a date range
3. Run It - click "Start" and get structured commodity price data in seconds

No coding, no setup, no manual browsing required.

🎯 Business Use Cases

• 📈 Commodities traders - monitor daily livestock prices and spot price movements across markets
• 🐄 Ranchers & feedlots - track cattle and hog prices to time sales and purchases
• 🥛 Dairy processors - follow cheese, butter, and milk price reports for procurement decisions
• 📊 Market analysts - build historical price datasets for trend analysis and forecasting models
• 🏦 Financial institutions - collect commodity price data for risk assessment and derivatives pricing
• 🏛️ Policy researchers - analyze agricultural market trends across regions and time periods

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🎯	Built for the job. Scoped specifically to this data source so you skip the parser engineering entirely.
🔖	Structured output. Clean, typed fields ready for analysis, dashboards, or downstream pipelines.
⚡	Fast. Optimized request patterns return results in seconds, not minutes.
🔁	Always fresh. Every run pulls live data, so the dataset reflects the source as of run time.
🌐	No infra to manage. Apify handles proxies, retries, scaling, scheduling, and storage.
🛡️	Reliable. Battle-tested across many runs and edge cases, with graceful error handling.
🚫	No code required. Configure in the UI, run from CLI, schedule via cron, or call from any language with the Apify SDK.

📊 Production-grade structured data without the engineering overhead of building and maintaining your own scraper.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ USDA Market News Scraper - Livestock, Grain & Commodity Prices (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	Full source coverage	Live per run	Source-native filters supported	⚡ 2 min
Build your own scraper	Engineering hours	Full once built	Whenever you maintain it	Custom code	🐢 Days to weeks
Paid managed APIs	$$$ monthly	Vendor-defined	Live	Vendor-defined	⏳ Hours
Third-party data dumps	Varies	Subset, often stale	Periodic	None	🕒 Variable

Pick this Actor when you want broad coverage, server-side filtering, and no pipeline maintenance.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the USDA Market News Scraper - Livestock, Grain & Commodity Prices page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Configure the input fields in the form (or paste a JSON), then set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

📊 Data & Analytics Build trend reports and dashboards from live source data Feed BI tools, warehouses, and ML pipelines with structured records Run periodic snapshots to track changes over time Compare segments, regions, or categories with consistent fields	🏢 Operations & Strategy Monitor competitor moves, pricing, and inventory shifts Build internal directories and lookup tools backed by current data Power workflows that depend on fresh source records Cut manual data-gathering time from hours to minutes
🎯 Marketing & Growth Identify market opportunities and trending topics Research target audiences and customer personas at scale Power lead-generation pipelines with verified records Track sentiment, reviews, or social signals over time	🛠️ Engineering & Product Prototype features that need real-world data without owning a crawler Replace fragile in-house scrapers with a managed Actor Wire datasets into your apps via the Apify API or webhooks Skip the proxy, retry, and parsing maintenance entirely

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Empirical datasets for papers, thesis work, and coursework Longitudinal studies tracking changes across snapshots Reproducible research with cited, versioned data pulls Classroom exercises on data analysis and ethical scraping	🎨 Personal and creative Side projects, portfolio demos, and indie app launches Data visualizations, dashboards, and infographics Content research for bloggers, YouTubers, and podcasters Hobbyist collections and personal trackers
🤝 Non-profit and civic Transparency reporting and accountability projects Advocacy campaigns backed by public-interest data Community-run databases for local issues Investigative journalism on public records	🧪 Experimentation Prototype AI and machine-learning pipelines with real data Validate product-market hypotheses before engineering spend Train small domain-specific models on niche corpora Test dashboard concepts with live input

🔌 Integrate with any app

USDA Market News Scraper - Livestock, Grain & Commodity Prices connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications in your channels
• Airbyte - Pipe results into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits and releases
• Google Drive - Export datasets straight to Sheets

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes. Push fresh data into your product backend, or alert your team in Slack.

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan to run this actor?

No. You can start right now on the free Apify plan, which includes $5 in free monthly credit. That is enough to run this actor several times and explore the output before committing to anything. Paid plans unlock higher limits, more concurrent runs, and larger datasets. Create a free Apify account here to get started.

🚨 What happens if my run fails or returns no results?

Failed runs are not charged. If the source site changes, proxies get rate-limited, or a specific input matches nothing, re-run the actor or open our contact form and we will investigate. You can also check the run log in the Apify console to see why the run stopped.

📏 How many items can I scrape per run?

Free users are limited to 10 items per run so you can preview the output and confirm the actor works for your use case. Paid users can raise maxItems up to 1,000,000 per run. Upgrade here if you need full scale.

🕒 How fresh is the data?

Every run fetches live data at the moment of execution. There is no cache or delay: the records you get reflect what the source returned at that moment. Schedule the actor to maintain a rolling snapshot of the data you need.

🧑‍💻 Can I call this actor from my own code?

Yes. Apify exposes every actor as a REST endpoint and ships first-class SDKs for Node.js and Python. You can start a run, read the dataset, and handle webhooks from your own app in a few lines. All you need is your Apify API token.

📤 How do I export the data?

Every Apify dataset can be downloaded in one click from the console as CSV, JSON, JSONL, Excel, HTML, XML, or RSS. You can also pull results programmatically via the Apify API or stream them into BigQuery, S3, and other destinations through built-in integrations.

📅 Can I schedule the actor to run automatically?

Yes. Use the Apify scheduler to run the actor on any cadence, from hourly to monthly. Results are saved to your dataset and can be delivered to webhooks, email, Slack, cloud storage, or automation tools such as Zapier and Make.

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🔗 Integrate USDA Market News Scraper with any app

• Make - Automate commodity price monitoring workflows
• Zapier - Get alerts when prices hit your thresholds
• Slack - Get daily price updates in your team channel
• Google Drive - Export price data to spreadsheets
• Webhooks - Trigger actions when runs complete

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Pro Tip: 💡 Browse our complete collection of data collection actors to find the perfect tool for your needs.

🆘 Need Help?

• Check the FAQ section above for common questions
• Visit the Apify documentation for platform guides
• Contact us at Tally contact form

⚠️ Disclaimer

This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the USDA, the Agricultural Marketing Service, or any government agency. It accesses only publicly available data through the official USDA AMS Market News API.