Review of USDA “Masked” Flow Data for a Subset of U.S. Cotton Warehouses

USDA periodically shares masked flow data with the National Cotton Council. This data is first “normalized” in a manner that prevents the shared information from being tracked back to a specific warehouse or group of cotton warehouses. Three major components of flow activity, bales shipped, bales not picked up and warehouse inventory, are normalized. This process allows the information to be factored in a manner that results in an “effective capacity” for each warehouse to be recorded as 50,000 bales of cotton, regardless of a warehouse’s size or inventroy. The data set is of sufficient size, 100 cotton warehouses out of 400 plus warehouses, to ensure that all major activity patterns are included in the masked data. Because the data covers a period from January, 2007 through mid-August, 2013, activity levels at the warehouses can be tracked over time and grouped with warehouses having similar activity patterns.