Where prices sit vs. normal
Farm-gate prices — what Idaho growers actually received — scored against the 5-year average for the same season. The marker is today, the tick is the 5-year average, and the shaded band is the ±3% either side of it that counts as normal. The bar spans the 5-year low to the 5-year high. Framed for a seller: higher is better.
This week's market quotes
The freshest published bid or shipping-point quote for each commodity, with the change since the prior report.
Watch items
Things that change how you should read the numbers above.
Latest news
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Method & caveats
Two different layers, deliberately kept apart
Farm gate is the USDA NASS price actually received by Idaho growers — the only series with a clean, same-basis 5-year history, so it is the only layer scored as high or low. Market quotes are the live published bids and shipping-point prices. A Portland terminal bid and an Idaho farm-gate price are not the same number and are never compared to each other here — that mismatch is the most common way a price dashboard misleads.
How "abnormally high or low" is computed
The band is set by the gap to the 5-year seasonal average: within ±3% reads normal, ±3–10% above or below normal, ±10–20% high or low, beyond ±20% very high or very low. It is deliberately not set by position inside the 5-year min–max range — with only five observations a single outlier year stretches the range and makes an at-average price look abnormal. August 2022 alfalfa at $280/ton does exactly that. The range position is still shown on the meter, and the shaded band marks ±3% of the average. Baselines use the same calendar season as the current reading wherever the data allows; where they don't, the row says so.
What this dashboard cannot tell you
No public source publishes a Pocatello, Blackfoot or American Falls cash grain bid — the Idaho Grain Market Report dropped that row after it read "No Bid" through 2024. Malt barley contracts and potato processing contracts are privately negotiated and never disclosed. The open-market potato price is tracked only by a subscription service. Where a number here is a proxy or an estimate rather than a local observed bid, it is labeled as one on the card.
A note on the source links
USDA AMS serves its daily and weekly reports from rolling URLs that get overwritten in place — the same link that shows today's Portland bids will show tomorrow's tomorrow. So the source links below each card point at the current edition of that report, not a permanent snapshot of the figure quoted. The date on each card is the vintage the number was read from. If a linked report shows a different number than the card, the card is stale and the next refresh will pick it up.