Data on Prices From NASS

As  previously mentioned, you can find agricultural commodity price data through the National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS). The prices paid group in the economics sector on the NASS website should be one of the first places you look for price indexes for commodities and other inputs (including fertilizers, pesticides, and other production factors). This information will be vital to your time series analysis, as it generally requires a large amount of data on prices.

Let's walk through an example of retrieving NASS price information together:

1. Choose the crops sector.
2. For the group, select horticulture.
3. Set mushrooms as the commodity.
4. Under "Choose Data Items," scroll to and select "Mushrooms, Agaricus, Sales Measured in $/lb."
5. For domain, select total.
6. Set the geographic level to national.
7. Click Continue.

You will see that in the case of mushrooms, only annual prices are available using “Get Data,” which you can visualize.

If you click "More" under the statistics table, you'll be redirected to the Quick Stats.

Other commodities, such as milk or eggs, will have monthly data available at the national and state levels, which could become a limitation for your analysis. You may need to search out other sources if you require weekly or daily prices.