Fruit in Charts: The winners and losers of 2018 (Part 2 of 3)
Here is part two of three looking at the winners and losers of 2018. The previous article was based on pricing information made available by the USDA market data, and here we will look at the volume data.
The USDA’s volume data is one of the most complete representations of a market available everywhere – not only considering imports to the U.S., but national production to a large extent as well. In 2018 we also saw a big improvement to the data set, which now offers more complete information for several commodities (mostly citrus), which used to only partially include U.S. production.
[Agronometrics users can view this chart with live updates here]
This might be a good time to mention the new data that the USDA has begun reporting for certain commodities. At the end of this article I put the chart of lemon volumes by origin where you can very clearly see the new volumes that are being reported, Keep in mind that this is not new volume – California has produced lemons for as far back as we have had data, but the volumes just weren’t being reported. This being the case, it is very difficult to make a level comparison of the commodities with the new reports to others so I put an asterisk next to all the fruit that is reporting new volumes that might create a problem in this analysis.
In bold, the commodity “All” represents the average growth for all the products we have in Agronometrics, which shows that volumes, as a whole, grew by 6.02% in 2018. This includes lemons and oranges, but is still an impressive level of growth.
To read this chart, keep in mind that 100% equals the same volume as last year, where anything above is growth and anything below is a loss.
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In the graph below you will find our example of the new data that the USDA is reporting.
[Agronometrics users can view this chart with live updates here]
Written by: Colin Fain