Pork Monitor: methodology
This page is public. It names every source, states every rule, and explains what the record can and cannot show.
What the publication reports
Market evidence about pork prices in the United States, from public sources, arranged so a restaurant, barbecue business, or caterer can check a supplier's price claim against it. Each issue has six parts: the read, the numbers, the explanation, the uncertainty, the buyer's question, and the record.
The publication does not estimate any supplier's cost, does not state whether any contractual adjustment is permitted, and does not forecast.
Sources
Official series, fetched by script with no browser and retained byte for byte:
| Source | What it gives | Cadence and lag |
|---|---|---|
| USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, National Weekly Pork Report FOB Plant, comprehensive (report 2680) | The pork carcass cutout in dollars per hundredweight and each of the six primals separately: loin, butt, picnic, rib, ham and belly, under mandatory price reporting. The whole series comes in one request, so year-over-year is available in every issue. | Weekly, Monday, for the week ending the prior Friday. |
| USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Quarterly Hogs and Pigs | All hogs and pigs, the breeding herd, and market hogs by weight group, both years with NASS's own percent-of-previous-year column. | Quarterly, late March, June, September and December. |
| U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, public API v2 | PPI commodity indexes WPU0132 (slaughter hogs) and WPU02210444 (pork, fresh and frozen, unprocessed, all cuts, made in slaughtering plants). CPI-U CUUR0000SEFD (pork) and CUUR0000SEFV (food away from home). Average prices in dollars per pound: APU0000FD3101 (all pork chops), APU0000704111 (sliced bacon). Not seasonally adjusted. | Monthly, released mid-month for the prior month. |
| USDA Economic Research Service, Food Price Outlook | Year-over-year CPI changes and forecast intervals for pork, for meats, and for food away from home. Attribute text is kept verbatim. | Monthly, about the 25th. |
| USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, Weekly Pork and Beef Variety Meat Report | Variety meats and the week's trading context. Retained as evidence; figures quoted from it are entered by the editor and checked against the capture. | Weekly. |
Rules
- Compare like with like: pork by primal and by market basis. The carcass cutout and a single primal are different measures and are never averaged together. Wholesale and retail are never averaged. An index is never converted to a price.
- A price claim about pork is usually a claim about one primal. Each issue reports the carcass cutout and every primal beside it, and names which primal moved most on the year, because belly and rib move very differently from ham and a claim framed as "pork" may rest on one of them.
- Year-over-year means the week ending nearest to 52 weeks earlier, within four days. A trailing four-week average is shown beside the single week.
- NASS reports the quarterly hog inventory on a December-through-November year, so a December 1 inventory belongs to the calendar year before the column it appears under. Rows are dated accordingly and the convention is stated in each row's note.
- Cells NASS leaves blank because an estimation period has not begun are skipped, never read as zero.
- A source that fails to fetch is recorded as failed. Nothing is substituted from another source.
- A parser that cannot find what it expects fails the source rather than guessing.
- Rows are never edited or deleted. A corrected reading is appended and the earlier row stays.
- A measure is added only when it helps answer a reader's question.
What this record cannot show
The hog inventory is quarterly, so for most of any quarter the most recent supply figure is already weeks old. Mandatory price reporting covers trade at reporting plants; it is not every transaction in the country. A cutout value is the weighted value of a whole carcass, and no buyer buys a whole carcass. Nothing here establishes why a particular supplier quoted a particular price.
Evidence and timestamps
Each issue directory holds numbers.json (every figure the issue quotes, regenerated from the data files), evidence.json (every capture file with URL, retrieval time, and SHA-256), and the issue as delivered. Capture files are hashed into an append-only chain anchored externally by RFC 3161 timestamp tokens and OpenTimestamps proofs.
An external timestamp shows that a captured file existed unchanged by the anchor date. It does not show that the source's figure was correct, or that a quoted price was available to every buyer.
The BLS request carries a free registration key. The key is read from the environment at fetch time and is never written into a capture file, a data file, or this repository. A response body that repeats the key is discarded and the fetch recorded as failed, so a rejected credential cannot enter the record.
Corrections
Corrections are made by appending a note to the affected issue and to the next issue. The original text stays visible.