What Is a Marketing Year?

Anyone who reads a WASDE forecast or this site's stocks-to-use numbers runs into "2024/25" almost immediately. It looks like a typo for a calendar year, but it isn't — it's a marketing year, and once you know what that means, USDA's whole system of numbers gets much easier to read.

Why not just use the calendar year

A calendar year splits a single harvest in two. Wheat harvested in the northern hemisphere in July isn't fully sold, stored and consumed by December 31 — most of it is still moving through the supply chain well into the following spring. A marketing year instead runs from roughly when a crop is harvested to just before the next harvest begins, so the entire supply-and-demand cycle of one harvest stays inside one reporting period instead of being artificially split across two calendar years.

The exact months differ by crop and country

Because harvests happen at different times worldwide, marketing years don't line up on a single global calendar. US wheat's marketing year runs June through May; US corn and soybeans run September through August; sugar and cotton use their own separate conventions again. A country in the southern hemisphere growing the same crop can have a marketing year running six months out of phase with its northern hemisphere counterpart, since its harvest falls at the opposite time of year.

How to read "2024/25"

The notation names the two calendar years a single marketing year spans — for a June-start wheat year, "2024/25" means June 2024 through May 2025. The first number is the year the marketing year begins; the second (abbreviated to two digits) is the year it ends. When you see a bare four-digit year attached to a WASDE or stocks-to-use figure instead, it's usually shorthand for the marketing year ending in that year, not the calendar year itself.

Why this matters for the prices you see

USDA's season-average price forecasts and stocks-to-use figures are both marketing-year numbers, not calendar-year averages — a "$6.00/bu" WASDE forecast is an estimate for the entire marketing year, not a single month's price, so comparing it directly to a spot price from one particular week is comparing two different kinds of number. Once you know which months a given marketing year actually covers, a forecast published months before that year even ends stops looking premature and starts looking like exactly what it is: an estimate for a period that's already partly known and partly still ahead.

Next article: Basis: Why Your Price Isn't the World Price