The DataCrop Blog
Reading the market before the invoice.
Post-mortems, methodology, and field notes on forecasting commodity prices from public USDA and Federal Reserve data — written by the team that builds the model.
Timing the harvest buy: margin, volatility, and the drivers that matter
Timing a grain buy isn't a crystal-ball problem - it's a plumbing problem. Here's the whole thing as four documented API calls instead of two days of parsing USDA files.
We publish our misses. Here's how honest our grain forecast really is.
Most forecast tools show you the one chart that worked. We show the scoreboard - including the week we measured our own band against a homemade one and lost. What we publish instead of an accuracy claim, and why the baseline ships inside every response.
Wheat fell 29%. The signal was in public data by April.
On July 10, USDA confirmed winter wheat production fell 29% year over year - the kind of move that torches a food manufacturer's margin plan. The signal was in the public data by spring.