How this is built
Methodology
What data Know Your Onions pulls, where it comes from, and how often it refreshes.
What we pull, and from where
Everything on this site comes off the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service reporting API. Four report families:
- the shipping-point (FOB) reports, which price onions at the origin district by pack, variety, grade and size, published each business day an origin is in season,
- the movement reports, the shipped and border-crossing volumes in USDA's 10,000-lb units, also published by business day,
- the terminal-market reports, wholesale prices at the destination markets,
- and the national retail-ad report, the weekly count of grocery ads.
How often
The pull runs weekly, ahead of the Monday brief, and covers a trailing window of business-day quotes, so a missed run backfills on the next one. An origin that is out of season simply stops quoting, and its pages say so rather than showing an estimate. Every data page carries two dates: "data through" is the newest reading in the data itself, and "page updated" is when the page was last rebuilt.
For how to read the numbers once they are in front of you, see how to read this.
Republishing our charts and statistics
The charts and statistics on Know Your Onions are free to republish. Use them in an article, a report, a class, a presentation, or a post — you do not need to ask us first. We ask one thing in return: credit Know Your Onions with a visible link back to the page you took the figure or chart from, and keep that link live.
Every chart has an Embed chart button with a snippet you can paste straight into a web page. Because it points at the live image, the chart you embed today keeps updating itself as new data lands — you never have to swap in a fresh screenshot. Every data page, guide, and issue has a Cite button that hands you a ready-made citation line, including the date the data runs through. If you are quoting a number, keep that date: it is what tells your reader how current the figure is.