The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) today released an upgraded version of its Agricultural Transportation Open Data Platform. This free tool, now called AgTransport 2.0 for short, was first introduced in June 2019 and assists USDA customers in making data driven decisions about transporting agricultural goods domestically and internationally.
The platform’s interactive format allows customers to view, access and download data related to several transportation reports, including the weekly Grain Transportation Report. It is an alternative to static PDFs and Excel versions of USDA data on the transportation of agricultural products by rail, truck, barge and ocean.
USDA’s transportation data reports inform the business of 30,000 subscribers, including farmers, commodity analysts, elevator operators, shippers, and other stakeholders. AgTransport 2.0—with its improved customer experience—will further enhance customers’ relationship with the data.
The upgrades to the platform include:
- New rail dashboard with expanded data, maps, and analysis featuring 14 years of Surface Transportation Board Public Waybill data in an easy-to-use, accessible format
- New ethanol transportation dashboard
- New dashboard for selected grain price and basis data
- New ocean vessel fleet data for bulk and container shipments
- Digitized ocean port profiles
- Digitized and updated modal share dataset for transportation of U.S. grains
- Three short videos, including an overview video about AgTransport 2.0 and two instructional videos on integrating data with Tableau and Excel
USDA will continue to look for ways to expand and improve the offerings on AgTransport 2.0 to ensure that its data are accessible, easily conceptualized and acted on, helping customers optimize their decision-making on how to deliver food efficiently and economically.
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