Get Daily USDA Produce Prices on Your Phone — Free

Every produce buyer starts the morning the same way: what are prices doing today? USDA Agricultural Marketing Service publishes the answer — shipping-point (FOB) and terminal market prices, refreshed every reporting day. The catch is that you have to go pull it: open the USDA Market News site, find the right report, filter to your commodity, and read the numbers off a dense table. Most buyers either run that errand every morning or skip it and negotiate on yesterday's gut feel.

This guide covers what USDA's two daily price series actually are, why having the report pushed to you beats pulling it by hand, and how to set up a free daily price alert that lands the numbers you care about on your phone first thing — by 7 a.m., before the first call of the day.

The two USDA price series every buyer should watch

USDA publishes two distinct daily price series, and they answer different questions.

Shipping-point (FOB) prices are what product costs at the US packing house, border crossing, or repack hub — graded, packed, and ready to load onto your truck. This is the benchmark for negotiating with importers, distributors, and re-shippers. (The produce industry uses "FOB" in a way that doesn't match the textbook Incoterms definition — we break that down in FOB vs CIF Explained.)

Terminal market prices are wholesale prices at the major destination-city markets — New York, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and others. This is what product is moving for at the end of the chain, in the big consumption markets.

Watching both at once gives you the spread between origin and destination — the signal that tells you whether margins on your commodity are widening or compressing this week. A shipping-point price in isolation tells you what you'll pay; the terminal price next to it tells you what the market on the other end is bearing.

Why "pulled" prices cost you time — and edge

The data is free and public. The problem is friction.

To pull it yourself each morning, you:

• navigate to USDA Market News and locate the correct Specialty Crops report for your commodity and region
• read the FOB shipping-point rows off a dense report, decoding the "mostly" band and the market-tone signal
• repeat the process for the terminal markets
• do it all again tomorrow

Miss a morning and you're quoting on stale numbers. None of it is hard — it's just repetitive, and repetition is exactly the kind of task that quietly slips when the day gets busy. The data isn't the bottleneck. The retrieval is.

What the daily report covers

The free daily price alert flips the model: instead of pulling, you get a clean report pushed to you each morning, Monday through Saturday, on USDA reporting days. You pick your commodities once, and the report carries:

• Shipping-point (FOB) prices for your commodities, grouped by origin district — Mexican crossings through Texas and Arizona, California growing districts, Florida sea-import points, and more
• Terminal market prices for the same commodities across the major destination cities
• The "as of" date on every line, so you always know exactly how current each number is

For example, a recent report listed Roma-type tomatoes crossing through Texas at $10.95–$18.95 per carton, with the same commodity wholesaling in New York at $15.00–$18.00 — origin and destination, side by side, in a single glance. That's the spread that usually takes two separate USDA lookups to assemble, delivered already paired.

Because the report covers whatever you select from more than 100 tracked commodities, two buyers watching different baskets get different reports — yours is built around what you actually trade, not a generic market summary.

Pick your commodities, pick your channel

Setup takes about a minute:

1. Choose the commodities you actually trade — limes, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, berries, onions, whatever you move
2. Choose how you want it delivered — WhatsApp, Telegram, or email
3. That's it — the report arrives each morning, no logging in, no spreadsheets to maintain

For most produce people, WhatsApp is where the workday already happens, so the report lands in the same place as the rest of your sourcing conversations — open it, scan your commodities, move on.

From prices to sourcing

Knowing the price is the first question every morning. The second one — once you've seen the number — is who's buying at that price, and from which suppliers. That's where shipment-level data comes in: the same platform that sends your price alert also maps who's importing what, from where, and in what volume, drawn from CBP records. (If you're new to where that data comes from, start with What is CBP AMS Data.)

But the daily price alert stands on its own. It's free, it's useful, and it shows up every morning whether or not you ever touch the rest of the platform.

Getting started

The free daily price alert is the simplest way to stop pulling USDA reports by hand. Pick your commodities, pick WhatsApp, Telegram, or email, and have shipping-point and terminal prices in your pocket each morning — before the first call of the day.

Start your free daily price alert on ProduceTradeIQ — no credit card required.

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Data sources: USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, Specialty Crops Market News — Shipping Point and Terminal Market reports. Prices referenced are illustrative excerpts from recent USDA reporting days, surfaced via the ProduceTradeIQ prices feature and the public USDA AMS data feed, and are subject to revision in subsequent reporting days.