Using AgFlow to Analyze ABARES Crop Reports

Reading time: 5 minutes

The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) crop reports provide quarterly data on all agricultural industries (including forestry and fishing) in Australia. As such, it is the best source of information to build Australia-related balance sheets.

However, the ABARES crop reports are extensive and come in a spreadsheet format. They are thus difficult to navigate through and require some work in order to derive information and trends from the data. It is, therefore, hard to appreciate the complete picture by only looking at the reports.

This is why AgFlow built a tool to facilitate navigating through and reading the data from ABARES crop reports.

AgFlow Coverage of ABARES Crop Reports Metrics

AgFlow covers all the Supply and Demand statistics for agricultural commodities in the ABARES crop reports. As such, it is already cutting down the workload by trimming out all irrelevant statistics and metrics for forestry, fishing, and livestock production in Australia. Thus, four different statistics are available for the past, current, and future crop marketing years.

Area Harvested (in ha):

The total Area Harvested for a given crop is often called acreage. However, the standard unit is in hectares (1 ha ~ 2,471 acres). ABARES crop reports provide the data for Area Harvested in thousands of hectares, and it is normalized to hectares on the AgFlow tool.

Production (in mt):

The Production is the total weight (often called volume) of crops harvested. This is the measure of the direct local crop supply, excluding beginning stock and imports. 

Yield (in mt/ha):

The Yield provides the number of tons produced per hectare. It is, in a way, a density measure. This statistic is used to understand the efficiency and/or the quality of harvested crops.

Exports (in mt):

Exports are the total volume of goods, from Australia, being sold and shipped to other countries.

These four metrics are the cornerstone of any balance sheet. In the ABARES report, they are presented in a somewhat disconnected way (as they are dispatched across different sections). However, in order to build a comprehensive balance sheet and make informed business decisions, it is necessary to compare all of these statistics together.

How Does AgFlow Display ABARES Crop Reports Metrics?

The tool deployed by AgFlow displays all the statistics mentioned above for all the Australian crops available in the ABARES report.

The user selects one commodity and generates a table based on metrics available in the ABARES crop report. The table summarizes: 

1. The reports from the last seven years are available on a year-by-year basis
2. The average for each metric in the previous seven years. 
3. On top of that, a time-series line chart instantly displays trends

This way, AgFlow saves the trouble of juggling through tabs in a spreadsheet and extracting the necessary data to produce charts. Furthermore, additional sources such as WASDE and Gafta provide other datasets, allowing for comparisons and benchmarking possibilities.

AgFlow Tool  & ABARES In a Nutshell

ABARES crop reports contain much information on the agricultural industries of Australia. Nonetheless, the sheer size of the reports makes it hard to comprehend the full picture of the Australian balance sheet. 

With AgFlow, the painstaking tasks of trimming the data, juggling with various tables to create a new spreadsheet are cut down by a tool providing:

• A summary of the most relevant Supply and Demand statistics available in the ARABES crop report with the last seven years of data in an easy-to-read table format
• An intuitive time-series line chart generated from any combination of three of the four statistics available

The present version of AgFlow’s Supply and Demand tool updates quarterly as soon as the newest ABARES report is available. 

A future version of the tool will provide a timely, accurate, and global vision of Supply and Demand. This new dynamic version will include daily AIS shipment lineups, quality metrics, prices, and other datasets to compare with reports like the ABARES. It will enhance tracking daily commodities flux, unveiling correlations between statistics, and even predicting global balance sheets moves.