ERS outlines cotton, wool and textile data products and plans to automate table releases

Les Meyer, an agricultural economist and the senior cotton and wool analyst at the USDA Economic Research Service, gave a technical overview of ERS fiber-related data products and an automation effort intended to speed publication and produce machine-readable files.

Meyer told attendees the ERS cotton and wool data collection supports commodity market analysis for industry, universities and government and draws from multiple USDA and external sources, including AMS price statistics, NASS production data, FAS trade data and international price series such as Cotlook.

The core ERS products Meyer described are threefold. First, the monthly Cotton and Wool Outlook tables, published two business days after the USDA WASDE release, provide U.S. and world cotton supply and use estimates, monthly fiber supply, demand and price statistics, and U.S. textile import and export data. "The cotton and wool Outlook tables are a monthly publication that provide the latest cotton updates from the WASDE report," Meyer said, noting they supplement the Outlook narrative.

Second, the Cotton and Wool Yearbook is an annual reference of roughly 45 tables that includes state-level U.S. cotton production, historical supply-and-demand series and more detailed textile and apparel trade by fiber. Meyer said the yearbook is published in late November and is useful as a historical reference.

Third, ERS publishes raw-fiber-equivalent estimates for U.S. textile trade: conversion factors are applied to Department of Commerce HS-code trade data to estimate the fiber quantity required to produce imported and exported textile and apparel items. "The raw-fiber-equivalent concept is an estimate of the fiber quantity that it takes to produce the textile and apparel items," Meyer explained, adding that the conversion factors account for manufacturing losses across production stages.

Meyer described an automation project that uses R scripts to download source files, process table layouts and output Excel and CSV files. The goals are timelier updates, improved machine readability and reduced manual processing errors; Meyer said the rollout begins with the upcoming cotton yearbook release and will make all 45 yearbook tables available in both printable and machine-readable formats.

During the Q&A, a participant identified as Michelle Huffman asked whether de minimis shipments are captured in the textile trade data. Meyer replied: "No — they are not accounted for in the trade data because the data that we use comes from the Census, Department of Commerce, and that de minimis data are not included." He said ERS relies on those Census trade series when preparing the raw-fiber-equivalent tables.

On how natural disasters are reflected, Meyer said ERS incorporates the latest available NASS production estimates and other USDA inputs into the WASDE process, and that those updates flow into ERS monthly tables and the Outlook text. "We would take the NASS data on production ... and any other information that's available from USDA that goes into the WASDE publication — that would be funneled into the tables," he said.

Meyer also answered questions about country and state coverage (stating ERS includes all countries present in the source trade data and that ERS uses NASS for U.S. production coverage), long-term shifts in production and consumption geography (noting expanded production in Brazil and large consumption in China and India) and efforts to combine automated processes across commodities.

The ERS fiber datasets, documentation and the freshly published Outlook tables are available on the ERS website; Meyer invited feedback and said attendees may follow up via the contact information provided on the slides. The session closed after attendees were encouraged to submit additional questions by chat or email.