The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) today announced the launch of a new dashboard, U.S. Grain Rail Exports to Mexico, and new datasets containing rail tariff rates for domestic grain transportation and for export to Mexico. The new dashboard, available on AMS’ Agricultural Transportation Open Data Platform (AgTransport), offers enhanced visibility into rail rates and movements, aiding agricultural shippers as they make decisions and work to manage risk in the agrifood supply chain.
U.S. Grain Rail Exports to Mexico Dashboard
The new dashboard provides insights into grain rail exports to Mexico through USDA’s inspections data, new annual flow maps, and to-the-border rail rate data.
For grain exports destined to Mexico, USDA’s Federal Grain Inspection Service’s (FGIS) inspections data contain originating states, grain commodity and class, and mode, with a lag of only about one week. The FGIS dataset provides a unique indicator of grain rail exports to Mexico that is more up to date than other publicly available data.
The dashboard contains newly released rail flow maps of grain shipments to Mexico, offering a unique view into origin, destination, and border crossing volumes for corn, soybean, and wheat rail shipments.
The dashboard also provides an interactive map of to-the-border railroad rates, containing thousands of monthly tariff rates grain shippers can use to compare rates.
Updates to Grain Rail Tariff Collection
This year, AMS released a major upgrade to its domestic corn, soybean, and wheat rail tariff collection. This upgrade almost doubles the number of published rates and improves coverage to better capture major grain flows. The new data include wheat, corn, and soybean tariff rates to domestic end users (e.g., corn to cattle feedlots in the Texas Panhandle and wheat to major flour mills), as well as export terminals (e.g., the Pacific Northwest and U.S. Gulf). For more information on the new grain rail tariff rate collection, see Grain Transportation Report, May 1, 2025.
These enhancements to the AgTransport Platform help farmers, commodity analysts, elevator operators, shippers, and other stakeholders access USDA data that assist them in making timely market decisions about moving agricultural products across the country and around the world.
Users gain personalized insights through the platform’s interactive charts, unique visualizations and data views that are updated automatically over time. In addition, users can easily access and download historical data about the transportation of agricultural products by rail, truck, barge, and ocean vessel. Visit AgTransport to get started.
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