Kansas Cattle Market Data
Weekly Kansas cattle, hay, and drought data that's loaded automatically and published as a set of Evidence reports
Python
Neon Postgres
GitHub Actions
Evidence
Netlify
Click a screenshot to see the whole page.
About this project
A pipeline and a set of reports to visualize the Kansas cattle market, hay prices, and weather conditions. Every week scripts pull the latest public reports from USDA Market News (the Kansas Weekly Cattle Auction Summary, the Kansas Direct Cattle report and the Kansas Direct Hay report) and from the U.S. Drought Monitor, clean them up, and store them in a Postgres database. A few hours later the reports rebuild with the new week's numbers. If you would like to learn more technical details about this project visit: How it was built →
The reports
- Cattle Market Trends. Auction prices and volume over time.
- Backgrounding Economics. A what-if calculator that tests feeding a steer to a heavier weight against each past year's auction and hay prices.
- Hay Market. Price over time by hay type, package, and by USDA quality grade.
- Drought & Market Conditions. Tracks Kansas drought since 2000, and how it lines up with hay prices, steer prices, and auction volume since 2020.
- Direct vs. Auction. How cattle sold directly compare with similar cattle at the sale barn.
Updates
- The reports now load only the columns they use, cutting the data each rebuild pulls from the database by about 80%. The project pages have new wording, and the home page cards have buttons for the reports and the project page.
- Review pass on every report. Market Trends is now Cattle Market Trends and the home page; the Overview page is gone. Backgrounding Economics is now a sell-now-or-feed-it calculator that replays each past year. There is a new Hay Market page. The reports link to the USDA pages the data comes from.
- Review pass on the dashboards: a weight class dropdown on Market Trends, clearer descriptions, and tidier pages.
- Five dashboards published under kennanmasters.com/ag-data/.
- Weekly rebuild set up: new data is published every Tuesday without any manual step.
- Database moved from Supabase to Neon after the free Supabase project was paused.