May 9, 2011
Sheep and hog producers now have a similar market information tool that I blogged about several months back for cattle producers. The following describes the new tools.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture released new interactive dashboards which allow users to view data for slaughter swine and lamb markets in an easy-to-use, customizable way.
Dashboards provide users with quick, easy access to volume and price information that can be customized and downloaded. Dashboards are user-friendly visualization tools that bring market data to life and complement the existing data available through the Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) Market News site.
"This will help display information in graphs, charts and other ways that are meaningful and useful to our customers," said Rayne Pegg, AMS administrator. "AMS collects and publishes a great deal of information under Livestock Mandatory Reporting, and these tools help manage, sort and view data in a way that creates perspective."
With the addition of these commodities, the dashboards now provide weekly data for all three species covered by Livestock Mandatory Reporting: cattle, hogs and sheep. They also include daily tickers for cattle and hogs (insufficient trading activity exists to support a daily ticker for sheep). Modeled after the Cattle Dashboard, the new Swine and Lamb Dashboards include the same types of interactive features for querying and viewing slaughter hog and lamb market information, such as navigation tabs, maps, slide bars, drop down menus, graphs, tables, daily market tickers and download capabilities. For example, users can opt to view data on a national basis, or sort by regions.
To check out the Swine and Lamb Dashboards, visit the AMS Market News site at
http://marketnews.usda.gov/portal/lg . A users' guide is also available that provides a feature-by-feature overview of the dashboard.
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