Terms of Use &
Data License

Acceptance and scope

These Terms of Use and the Data License in Part II (together, the "Terms") are an agreement between you and HayWire Ag LLC ("HayWire," "we," "us"), a Minnesota limited liability company. They govern the HayWire website at haywireag.com, The Wire newsletter, HayWire Pro, and the public data feeds we publish (together, the "Services"). By using any of the Services you accept these Terms. If you are using the Services on behalf of a business, you represent that you have authority to bind that business, and "you" includes it.

You must be at least 18, or the age of majority where you live, to buy HayWire Pro or to send us a Submission. Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect, why, and who processes it; it is part of these Terms.

Definitions

• "HayWire Data" means the standardized price records, series, indexes, statistics, and market metadata we publish through any of the Services, including the HayWire Hay Index.
• "Feeds" means the machine-readable files we publish at haywireag.com/api/, including index.json and prices.json.
• "Derived Data" means data created by modifying, combining, aggregating, or otherwise processing HayWire Data, in whole or in part.
• "Pro Content" means content available only to paid HayWire Pro members, including the Pro dashboard and Pro editions of the newsletter.
• "Submissions" means anything you send us: price and field reports, replies to our emails, questions for the newsletter, and comments.

Accounts and Pro subscriptions

HayWire Pro is a paid membership, currently $16.99 per month or $170 per year. Checkout and billing are handled by our publishing platform and its payment processor; we do not store your card details. Subscriptions renew automatically until canceled. You can cancel anytime, and access continues through the end of the period you have paid for. New Pro members may request a full refund within 30 days of their first payment by replying to any HayWire email or writing to haywireagprices@gmail.com; access ends when the refund is issued. After that window, and for renewals, fees already paid are not refunded for partial periods except where required by law. We may change Pro pricing prospectively with notice; changes never apply retroactively to a period you have already paid for. Keep your login credentials to yourself — Pro Content is licensed to you, not to whoever holds your password.

Ownership and license grant

The underlying prices reported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture are facts in the public domain, and we claim no ownership of them. What HayWire owns is everything we build on top: the selection, standardization, normalization, verification, and arrangement of those reports into consistent records and series; the construction and methodology of our indexes; our databases; and our editorial and analytical content. That compilation is created through the expenditure of substantial time, effort, judgment, and money, and is protected as a compilation and database under United States copyright law and these Terms.

We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, revocable, non-transferable license to access and use the Services and HayWire Data as these Terms allow. All rights not expressly granted are reserved. Nothing in these Terms restricts your use of USDA source reports obtained directly from USDA.

Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• scrape, crawl, or bulk-harvest the website's pages by automated means — the Feeds exist precisely so machines have a sanctioned door, and programmatic access to the Feeds at reasonable request rates is expressly permitted under Part II;
• circumvent, or attempt to circumvent, the Pro paywall, authentication, or any access control;
• share, republish, or forward Pro Content outside your own operation;
• use the Services to build, calculate, or maintain a product or dataset that substitutes for HayWire Data (see Section 20);
• misrepresent HayWire Data, present altered figures as ours, or imply HayWire endorsement of your product or position;
• interfere with the operation or security of the Services.

Your submissions

When you send us a Submission, you give HayWire a non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide license to use, edit, summarize, publish, and include it in the Services and HayWire Data. We credit reader price reports and member questions to a region, never to your name or email, and we may check, edit, hold back, or decline any Submission. Reader-reported prices are published as reports from the field, separate from the USDA-based HayWire Hay Index; they are never mixed into it.

Send only what you have the right to share: no one else's confidential terms, and nothing you know to be false or misleading. If you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them without any obligation to you.

Data sources and USDA notice

HayWire Data is standardized from publicly available reports of the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) Market News and other U.S. government sources, which are works of the United States Government in the public domain. HayWire is an independent company. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or certified by USDA or any government agency. The standardization, normalization, and any errors introduced by it are ours alone; the authoritative record of any USDA report is the report USDA publishes.

Informational only; not advice

HayWire Data and all Services content are published for informational purposes. They are not an offer to buy or sell hay or any commodity, and they are not agronomic, financial, trading, legal, or tax advice. Hay markets are thin, regional, and quality-sensitive; a published range is not a guarantee of what your load will bring. Decisions you make in your operation — buying, selling, holding, hauling, contracting — are your own.

The Call is a market read graded in public against later auction prices. Its track record describes past Calls only; it does not predict future results, and a Call is not an instruction to buy, sell, or hold.

Parts of our analysis and commentary are produced with the assistance of artificial-intelligence tools, working from our verified data and reviewed under our editorial rules. AI-assisted content can contain errors, and it inherits every limitation described in this section and Section 11.

Sponsorship, advertising, and affiliate links

The free newsletter and parts of the website carry paid sponsorships, labeled as such, one sponsor per placement. Sponsors pay for placement only: they have no say over HayWire Data, our prices, the index, The Call, or our editorial content, and a sponsorship is not our endorsement of a sponsor or its products. Some pages may include affiliate links that can earn HayWire a commission; they never change what we list or the prices we report. Buying a sponsorship is governed by the insertion order you approve and the terms on our media kit.

Emails, referrals, and third-party services

Subscribing means you agree to receive the newsletter. Pro members also receive Pro editions, the market alerts they set up in the dashboard, and account and billing emails. Every newsletter has an unsubscribe link; account and billing emails continue while you have an account.

Our referral program rewards readers whose personal link brings in new subscribers (currently one free month of HayWire Pro for three sign-ups). Rewards are tracked by our publishing platform, count only real people who confirm their own subscriptions, and may be changed or ended at any time without taking away a reward already earned.

The Services rely on and link to third parties, including our publishing and payment platform, sponsors, and retailers. We are not responsible for their content or practices, and your use of them is governed by their own terms.

Disclaimer of warranties

The Services and HayWire Data are provided "as is" and "as available." We work hard on accuracy — exact reported trades only, validation gates, published methodology — but we do not warrant that the Services or HayWire Data will be accurate, complete, timely, uninterrupted, or error-free, and we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. USDA reporting schedules, coverage, and formats can change without notice, and the Services may change or pause accordingly.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, HayWire will not be liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, or trading or marketing losses, arising from the Services or HayWire Data, even if advised of the possibility. Our total aggregate liability for all claims arising out of these Terms will not exceed the greater of the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose or one hundred dollars ($100). Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold HayWire and its members, officers, and agents harmless from claims, damages, and reasonable expenses (including attorneys' fees) arising from your misuse of the Services or HayWire Data, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of law or third-party rights in connection with the Services.

Termination and survival

You can stop using the Services at any time; Pro cancellation works as described in Section 03. We may suspend or terminate access that breaches these Terms or threatens the integrity of the Services. On termination, the licenses granted to you end, but attribution obligations for anything you have already published, and Sections 04, 06, and 11 through 17, survive.

Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. The current version, with its effective date, always lives at haywireag.com/terms.html, and material changes will be noted in the newsletter or on the site. Continuing to use the Services after a change takes effect is acceptance of the updated Terms. Commercial Data Licenses are separate written agreements and are not modified by changes to this page.

Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Minnesota, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute arising out of these Terms or the Services will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Minnesota, and both parties consent to their jurisdiction. Before filing anything, write to us — most problems are fixable by email.

Miscellaneous and contact

These Terms, together with any written Commercial Data License, are the entire agreement between you and HayWire about the Services. If a provision is held unenforceable, the rest stand. Our not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.

Questions, notices, and licensing inquiries: haywireagprices@gmail.com.

Tier A — citation with attribution

You may quote or republish limited extracts of HayWire Data free of charge, provided each page, screen, document, or file that includes the data identifies HayWire as the source and, where practical, links to haywireag.com. Suggested form:

When citing the index, call it the HayWire Hay Index. Programmatic access to the Feeds at reasonable request rates is permitted under this tier; an extract is "limited" when it quotes or illustrates rather than substitutes — republishing the Feeds or the record-level dataset substantially in full is redistribution under Section 19, not citation.

Redistribution

Except for cited extracts under Section 18, you may not redistribute, resell, sublicense, syndicate, or otherwise make HayWire Data available to third parties — including through any website, application, API, file transfer, database, dataset, or data product — without a written Commercial Data License.

Derived Data and competing products

You may create Derived Data — analyses, models, charts, reports — from HayWire Data for use inside your own operation or company. You may not use HayWire Data to create, calculate, or maintain a competing price assessment, series, index, or dataset, or any product or service from which HayWire Data can be substantially extracted or reconstructed, whether offered commercially or free of charge.

Benchmark and settlement use

Citing a HayWire price or series in news, research, or commentary is Tier A. Using any HayWire price, index, or series to price, settle, margin, or benchmark a contract, transaction, or financial instrument of any kind — including physical supply contracts, forwards, futures, options, swaps, and insurance products — requires a written Commercial Data License.

AI and machine-learning use

Answering a user's question by citing HayWire Data with attribution is welcome under Tier A. Using HayWire Data or the Feeds to train, fine-tune, or ground a machine-learning model or dataset offered to third parties requires a written Commercial Data License.

Tier C — commercial data licensing

We license HayWire Data for redistribution, platform distribution, embedded product use, benchmark use, and historical research — attributed, entitlement-controlled, and delivered in the format your pipeline wants. Write to haywireagprices@gmail.com with what you are building and where the data would live, and we will come back with a structure.