Marketing year

A marketing year is the twelve-month accounting period, usually starting at harvest, over which a crop's supply, use, and stocks are measured.

Crops are not produced evenly through the calendar year, so statisticians measure them from harvest to harvest. The marketing year starts when the new crop begins to arrive and ends just before the next one. In the United States the corn and soybean marketing year begins in September; wheat’s begins in June; in Brazil soybeans run on a different clock again. Coffee and cocoa use crop years that start in October.

The convention matters when comparing numbers. A supply figure labeled “2023/24” refers to the harvest gathered in 2023 and consumed through 2024. Two sources that appear to disagree about a country’s wheat exports are often just using different year boundaries, one calendar and one marketing.

Marketing years also define what counts as ending stocks: the inventory left on the last day, which becomes the carryover into the next year. World totals are messy because countries’ years do not align; the USDA aggregates them anyway with stated conventions. See stocks-to-use.