About
About The Russet Report
The USDA potato shipping point number, read plainly by origin, variety, pack and count, with no advice attached.
What this is
The Russet Report is a weekly brief plus a set of always-current data pages on the fresh US potato market: USDA shipping point FOB prices by growing origin, variety, pack and carton count, the volumes shipped and crossed from Canada, and a board of what moved. It is built for the people who price potatoes for a living: growers, packers, foodservice and retail produce buyers, and brokers who need the FOB number without reading the raw USDA reports line by line.
Fresh market, not the process contract
This is a fresh-market report. Most of the US potato crop that goes to fries, chips and dehydration moves on contracts negotiated before the season, at prices that are private and that the open market never quotes. The fresh tablestock market, the potatoes packed in cartons, sacks and bags for grocery and foodservice, is the open price-discovery arena, and it is the one this site reports. The two can diverge in a given year. We cover the fresh side and say so plainly rather than blur the line.
Who writes it
The Russet Report is published by Alex Willen. The data pages are generated from the public USDA record on a fixed schedule; the weekly brief reads what moved and writes it up in plain English. Every hard number on every page traces back to the USDA report that published it.
Where the numbers come from
Everything comes from the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service: the shipping point (FOB) reports that are the wedge of this site, the movement reports that carry shipped and imported volumes, the terminal-market reports, and the national retail-ad report. Prices are reported exactly as USDA publishes them, as a mostly range or a low-high range with the pack named, then also normalized to a per-hundredweight figure so packs compare. Nothing here is estimated, interpolated or sourced from a private data vendor.
How often it updates
USDA publishes shipping point reports most business days, mid-afternoon Eastern. The pipeline pulls a trailing window of reports and the pages update, with the weekly brief reading the prior week. Potato is a year-round storage crop, so a small district that quotes only in its own window simply has no fresh price the rest of the year; that is rotation, not a gap. Every figure is dated to its own report date, and every page carries a visible Last updated stamp.
What we will and will not do
We report public USDA data and attribute every hard number to it. We do not forecast prices, movement, or crop transitions. We never tell a reader what to buy, sell, or contract for, in any phrasing. A price move in this market is neither good nor bad on its face; it matters to buyers and sellers in opposite ways, and we report the direction and size of it plainly. We are not trading, contracting, legal or financial advice; decisions are yours to make with your own market judgment and the primary data.
New here? Start with how to read this, or see the exact math behind every comparison on the methodology page.