I was looking on the usda website but they are currently down because of the government shutdown. Do they have historical crop estimates on their website? If not where could I go to get them? I am planning on doing some fundamental analysis and just mess around with some regression analysis and do some back testing. I am not currently trading but just want to see if I could come up with a system that combines fundamentals with technical entries and do some back testing. Thanks.
or if you can read spanish http://www.bolcereales.com.ar/descargar-documento5-0/reportes_mercado-descargar
They definitely have what you're looking for. Google USDA WASDE. Go directly to the USDA site that contains those monthly reports OR to the Mann Library site (at Cornell) which has been a back-up or mirror or some kind of repository for years. The reports are available in pdf, csv/Excel and I think one other format maybe, XML. You can also Google USDA PSD and that will take you to a huge database going back to about 1960. It spits out query results in csv/Excel, so you'll get a lot of data at once in an easy to use format. The first option will give you access to all the monthly reports (you only need every other month because each month includes a column for the previous month's estimate). I don't know if the PSD dbase includes all months or just the final data for the respective marketing year plus the most recent month.