How we collect prices

Who reports

Prices come from our own network of reporters. Each reading carries the reporter's name, and the board tells you when more than one reporter agrees on a price. Today the network includes a partner organisation covering six towns across Zambia and individual reporters who walk their local markets, including a daily reporter at Soweto Market in Lusaka, the country's largest fresh-produce market. In the last two weeks, prices have come in from ten different markets.

A reporter is one identity however their name is typed. Behind the scenes we fold spelling and spacing differences together, so two reporters agreeing on the board always means two people, never one person counted twice.

Observed and Relayed

Every reading is tagged with how it was gathered:

• Observed: the reporter stood at the stand and recorded the price being asked or paid, that day, at that market.
• Relayed: the price was passed to the reporter by a trader or contact at the market, typically by phone, and recorded the same day. Relayed prices widen our coverage; the tag tells you the reporter did not see the transaction themselves.

From a notebook to the board

Reporters record a low, typical, and high price for each commodity and unit, because a market rarely has one price. What the board leads with is the typical price. When several reporters cover the same commodity at the same market on the same day, we publish the median of their readings, so one unusual entry cannot move the number on its own.

Sheets are uploaded daily and checked before anything publishes. A row naming a commodity, market, or unit we do not recognise is not guessed at: it is held until a person maps the wording, and only then does the price appear. A re-uploaded sheet updates the readings it already contributed instead of duplicating them.

What we deliberately leave out

Agents sometimes quote a price at which they would procure produce from a farmer. Those quotes are an offer to buy, not a market price, and mixing the two would quietly lower the board. We store agent quotes separately and never publish them as market prices.

The prices we publish are the price at the market stand. What a farmer takes home is that number minus transport, agent commission, and market fees, which vary by market and by arrangement. We say this on the board rather than pretending the stand price is the take-home price.

What these prices are, and are not

cropagora prices are recorded market observations, not official prices. They are a guide for deciding when and where to sell, and for understanding a market. They are not legal quotations, not an offer by cropagora or its reporters to buy or sell at those prices, and not a substitute for agreeing a price with your buyer.