USDA Migrates Data Archive to New Website, Dropping Cornell’s Mann Library

By Julie Ingwersen

CHICAGO, Sept. 30 (Reuters) – Archived crop and livestock reports from the U.S. Department of Agriculture were set to transfer to a new government website on Wednesday with the agency’s existing online archive, hosted by Cornell University’s Mann Library, decommissioned, the USDA and a Cornell official said on Tuesday.

The USDA’s online Economics, Statistics and Market Information System, an archive of USDA reports dating to 1973, will move to the USDA’s National Agricultural Library.

Two reports released by the USDA on Tuesday — its quarterly grain stocks and annual small grains reports — said archived editions were stored on the legacy Cornell site. But a Cornell representative said the USDA reports would no longer be available from the Mann Library site starting on Oct. 1.

Many of the USDA’s major market-sensitive reports, including its monthly World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report, a key reference for the grains trade, had already moved on Tuesday to the new website.

The new platform also includes reports from the USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service on quarterly U.S. grain stocks, cattle on feed, and weekly U.S. crop progress reports, among other topics.

With the prospect of a government shutdown looming on Tuesday, a USDA spokesperson did not comment specifically on whether the agency’s new platform would remain accessible or would be among the services disrupted.

Other USDA sub-agencies, including the Foreign Agricultural Service, the Economic Research Service and the Agricultural Marketing Service, will upload new reports to their respective websites, a note on the Cornell website said.

USDA announced in April that it planned to migrate its report archives from Cornell’s Mann Library and onto an alternative platform as a way to “modernize its processes,” without detailing what that would entail.

(Reporting by Julie Ingwersen; Editing by Bill Berkrot)