Farm-gate leads retail by one to three months; the spread between them is the middle of the supply chain.
For 5 grocery staples the page lines up every stage of the price chain the engine can observe — futures where a contract trades, the USDA farm-gate price the producer receives, and the BLS shelf price the shopper pays — each indexed to January 2018 = 100 so different units can share one chart, and reports the farmer's share of the retail dollar. Each stage indexed to Jan 2018 = 100 from monthly averages: front-month futures (FMP, in the exchange's own quote units: cents per bushel for wheat and corn, cents per pound for live cattle, dollars per hundredweight for Class III milk), USDA NASS national price received by farmers, and BLS average retail price. Farm-gate moves show up at the shelf with a 1–3 month lag; the widening or narrowing of the spread is the middle-of-the-chain margin story. Eggs are priced per dozen at both ends, so the farmer's share compares like with like: the same unit and the latest month both prices cover.
| Staple | Futures (front month) | Farm-gate price | Farm YoY | Retail price | Retail YoY | Farmer's share of the retail dollar | Markup, farm to shelf |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eggs | — | $1.03/doz (August 2026) | -54.6% | $2.27/doz (September 2026) | -34.9% | 45¢ of $1 (August 2026) | +121% |
| Milk | $15.07/cwt (Class III) (October 2026 average to date) | $19.80/cwt (August 2026) | -5.3% | $4.11/gal (September 2026) | -0.6% | units differ — not comparable | — |
| Beef | 224.73¢/lb live (October 2026 average to date) | $231.00/cwt live (August 2026) | -2.1% | $6.79/lb ground (September 2026) | +7.4% | units differ — not comparable | — |
| Wheat → Bread | 727.06¢/bu (October 2026 average to date) | $6.23/bu (August 2026) | +28.7% | $1.83/lb (September 2026) | -2.0% | units differ — not comparable | — |
| Corn (feed input) | 490.5¢/bu (October 2026 average to date) | $4.45/bu (August 2026) | +12.4% | — | — | no retail price | — |
Where farm and retail are quoted in the same unit, the share compares like with like: for eggs the producer received 45 cents of each retail dollar in August 2026 ($1.03 against $2.27 on the shelf, a +121% markup covering grading, packing, transport and the retailer's margin).
Farm-gate prices lead the shelf by one to three months for perishables and longer for processed goods; futures lead the farm gate by a further few months where they exist. The spread between the two lines is the middle of the supply chain — processing, freight, wholesale and retail margin — and it is the diagnostic: when the shelf price spikes while the farm price does not, the increase is being taken in the middle, and when the farm price falls and the shelf does not follow, margins are widening. When both move together the cause is upstream (feed costs, disease, weather). The farm-gate series are USDA NASS prices received by producers, monthly; the retail series are BLS average prices from the CPI outlet sample, monthly; futures are front-month contracts from the exchange feed, averaged monthly. A farm series is marked stale when USDA has not published within its normal window.
On the dashboard the equal-weight food-futures composite (wheat, corn, soybeans, cattle, hogs) is 7.46% year over year against 2.48% for CPI food. The composite leads grocery CPI by about 3–6 months through the input-cost channel; it is a display signal only, never an input to the index. Food at home is held at its official subindex in the Gauge — the USDA weekly composite is ingested and graded as a diagnostic but not spliced, because it read about 1.7 points below the shelf on average and worsened the print-eve grade — so this page is where the upstream food signal is visible before it reaches either the Gauge or the CPI. Each item page carries its own chain under the shelf price, and the pages for eggs, ground beef, milk, bacon, chicken, butter, cheese, potatoes, tomatoes, bananas and oranges add Nowflation's monthly index of USDA-reported advertised prices for their category.