The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) on June 1 notified the NGFA that it has released an upgraded version of its free Agricultural Transportation Open Data Platform, which enables users to access and customize rail, truck, barge and ocean vessel transportation data and information to meet their operational needs and interests.
The web-based tool – known as Ag Transport 2.0 – first was unveiled in June 2019. It is designed to allow users to make data-driven decisions about transporting agricultural products in both domestic and international commerce.
The platform’s interactive architecture and format allows users to view, access and download data related to several USDA transportation reports, including the weekly Grain Transportation Report – an alternative to the previous static PDF files and Excel versions of ag transportation data that USDA provided.
The newest upgrades to the USDA platform include a:
- New rail dashboard with expanded data, maps and analysis, featuring Surface Transportation Board public waybill data dating to 2005 in an easy-to-use, accessible format;
- New ethanol transportation dashboard;
- New dashboard for selected grain price and basis data;
- New ocean vessel fleet data for bulk and container shipments;
- Digitized ocean port profiles;
- Digitized and updated modal-share dataset for transportation of U.S. grains; and
- Three short videos, including an overview video about AgTransport 2.0 and two instructional videos on integrating data with Tableau and Excel.
USDA said it will continue to explore ways to expand and improve the customizable data available through AgTransport 2.0 to ensure that its data are accessible, easily conceptualized and actionable in an effort to help users optimize their transportation decision-making.
More information about the tool is available at: https://agtransport.usda.gov. USDA advises users that previously relied upon the earlier version of the platform to perform a full refresh of the page by pressing Ctrl-F5 on their keyboards to view the new content.
