The USDA’s Global Agricultural Trade System (GATS): A Data Resource
Trade data can answer hard questions about who buys U.S. dairy and who sells it to us. The trick is knowing what the tool measures and what it leaves out.
What is GATS?
The Global Agricultural Trade System is a data tool maintained by the Foreign Agricultural Service. It lets users look up U.S. agricultural exports and imports and trade between other countries, by product, partner and period. Because it is a database rather than a report, you ask it questions and it returns tables.
Check the official page for the current features, which can change over time.
A good first exercise is simple: pick one product, such as cheese, and look at exports to your three largest partners across several years. You will learn how the tool works without drowning in categories.
What questions can it answer for dairy?
Common questions include which countries buy U.S. cheese or milk powder, whether imports of a certain product are rising, and how a competitor exporter is doing. You can compare products and regions, and view trends over a series of years.
For a Texas processor deciding where to look for new customers, patterns across several years are more useful than a single month. A market that keeps growing is more interesting than one that spiked once.
If the data surprises you, do not change plans right away. Ask a trusted advisor or Extension economist to review it, because a search setting or classification code can produce a misleading result.
- Top destination countries for a product
- Import and export trends over several years
- Competitor exporters in a market
How do you search without getting lost?
Begin narrow. Choose a product category, a trading partner and a period, and see what comes back. Dairy products are grouped under standard trade classification codes, so look up the right category before you search; the U.S. International Trade Commission publishes the tariff schedule and classification tools.
Save your searches or write down your settings so that you can repeat them later. Many people forget which categories they included and end up comparing different things.
What are the limits of trade data?
Trade statistics record shipments, not final consumers. A cheese shipment to one country may be re-exported elsewhere. Values and volumes can be revised, and reporting delays mean the latest months are often incomplete. Exchange rates and prices also affect value figures, so a rising value does not always mean rising volume.
The data also cannot tell you why something happened. Pair it with market commentary, such as the weekly Dairy Market News and the NASS production statistics.
How can a farm use it day to day?
A producer can use it to understand why milk prices are moving, to listen more critically to buyer talk, and to plan conversations with a cooperative or processor. Ask your field rep what the trade data suggests about demand for the products your milk goes into.
If you are a processor, trade data can help you identify target markets before you contact the Texas Department of Agriculture or an industry group. The dairy herd guide and farm money guide on our sister sites cover the herd and the budget.
How can you explain the numbers to your family or board?
Make one simple chart: exports of your product category over several years, with the top three partners. Add a sentence on what changed and a sentence on what you are doing about it. Resist the urge to show everything; a chart that tells one story gets used, while a chart that tells ten stories gets ignored.
If you share the findings with a cooperative board or a family partnership, note the data source and the date you pulled it, and mention that figures can be revised. Good habits like that build trust and make later decisions easier to defend.
Where else can you build your skills?
Extension economists often run workshops on reading market data; start with Texas A&M AgriLife Extension. For more on how markets shape farm life, see farm economics at farm.FM and a farm.FM story on trade data. The farm satire page is also a decent break after a long session of spreadsheets.
Our site is independent of USDA, so the database itself is the final word on its own numbers.
Sources and further reading
- USDA Foreign Agricultural Service: export markets and trade data
- U.S. International Trade Commission: tariff and trade data
- USDA Dairy Market News: weekly dairy price reports
- USDA NASS: agricultural statistics and surveys
- Texas Department of Agriculture: state agriculture agency
- Texas A&M AgriLife Extension: Texas extension service
Ask locally: Ask an Extension economist or your cooperative's market analyst to walk you through a first search.