Mandatory Price Reporting

Mandatory Price Reporting

Mandatory Price Reporting. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. It's called Mandatory Price Reporting and what that means is getting a fair market value for your products. There are a number of parts involved in the recent reauthorization of the program according to Warren Preston with the Agricultural Marketing Service. PRESTON: It adds the provision for mandatory pork reporting and it requires the USDA to go through a negotiated rule making process to promulgate the rule for pork reporting and then it also requires the USDA to set up an electronic reporting system for the current mandatory reporting program for dairy products. The bill extends reporting requirements of livestock daily markets for five years and adds pork and dairy requirements. Before, the entire process was only voluntary. PRESTON: We only get information off the negotiated cash transactions and that's through cooperation where our market news reporters in the field are contacting the packers in the industry and buyers, finding out what volumes are being traded, qualities, prices again. Under the mandatory system, we'll have to go through a negotiated rule making process and the law tells us some of the interested parties we need to bring to the table and they'll actually work with us to develop a proposed rule. President Obama signed the Mandatory Price Reporting Reauthorization legislation has been signed into law and hopes that it will provide more transparency in the markets. In addition to current law, the bill calls for reporting on Mandatory Reporting of Wholesale Pork meat cuts. PRESTON: Under the livestock mandatory reporting program currently we get transaction level data at a minimum of twice a day, sometimes more often from the packers where they report to us all of their purchases of cattle, hogs, sheep and lambs and the also on the boxed beef and the boxed lamb we also get the information what they sold. And we get information on the quantities, the qualities, the different purchase types and that allows us to assemble the information into market reports. Following the President's signing of the act many agricultural organization leaders voiced their support for the law. Preston talks about how the information is used. PRESTON: We turn around within an hour of receiving the data, we review it, we validate it, summarize it, aggregate it all up and publish it for the publics use, and the information is used widely throughout the industry. It's used for analysis by economists that are looking at longer term types of questions, it's used by trade analysts that are looking at very short term types of marketing decisions and it's used by both farmers and ranchers and producers and the packers and retailers just to know what's going on the in the marketplace. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.
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