Agricultural Marketing Service
The Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), an agency of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), oversees programs in five commodity areas: cotton and tobacco, dairy, fruits and vegetables, livestock and seeds, and poultry. AMS provides testing, standardization, grading, and market news services. AMS operates several public APIs for agricultural market data including the Market Analysis Reporting System (MARS) API for real-time commodity market news and the Livestock Mandatory Price Reporting System (LMPRS) API for livestock price data.
APIs
USDA AMS MARS API (MyMarketNews)
The Market Analysis Reporting System (MARS) API provides programmatic access to USDA AMS agricultural market news data. The API allows users to automatically pull raw market new...
USDA AMS LMPRS API (Livestock Mandatory Price Reporting)
The Livestock Mandatory Price Reporting System (LMPRS) API provides programmatic access to federally mandated livestock price report data. The API requires no authentication for...
USDA Local Food Directories API
The USDA Local Food Directories API provides data sharing access to directory information for farmers markets, food hubs, on-farm markets, community supported agriculture (CSA) ...
Features
The MARS and LMPRS APIs are publicly accessible without authentication; registered users can obtain API keys for higher rate limits.
All API responses are returned in JSON format including errors and paginated results.
MARS API provides up-to-date commodity price and volume data as reports are released by AMS market reporters.
Access up to 180 days of historical market data per request with up to 100,000 records returned per call.
Market data covers livestock, dairy, fruits, vegetables, grains, cotton, tobacco, poultry, and other agricultural commodities.
LMPRS API provides federally mandated livestock price data under the Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act.
Use Cases
Track commodity prices across livestock, dairy, fruits, and vegetables to support trading, purchasing, and production decisions.
Pull historical and current market news data for academic research, economic analysis, and policy work.
Integrate USDA market news data into supply chain management and procurement systems for real-time pricing.
Use the Local Food Directories API to locate and integrate data about farmers markets, CSAs, and food hubs.
Build automated price monitoring systems using the MARS API to trigger alerts when prices cross defined thresholds.
Integrations
USDA AMS provides guides for integrating MARS API data directly into Microsoft Excel for market analysis.
AMS APIs are accessible through the federal api.data.gov gateway for consistent API key management.