somewhat related - excerpt from Cryptonomicon -
The percussionist stands up. "Every radio operator has a distinctive style of keying—we call it his fist. With a bit of practice, our Y Service people can recognize different German operators by their fists—we can tell when one of them has been transferred to a different unit, for example."
This made me recall Meilir Page-Jones' book "Practical Project Management" from way back...
"Second, employees who are truly competent and are eager to make a genuine contribution to the department soon resign from a mediocracy, leaving behind them the dross of nonproducers and internecine warriors. I term this effect the Inverse Gresham’s Law: A mediocracy hoards mediocre people and drives good people into general circulation."
https://www.overviewproject.org/
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http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781565926219 - Python Programming on Win32 has some good info and some stories on "batch processing" of office docs. Good case study on "Applied Biometrics" capturing of drug testing process.
I've used the py/com stuff to do some of what you want - build xls files with "macros" for calculations, etc. You have the option of doing it in python or inserting the excel code into cells. You can also find other "excel" controls for python that create csv file versions of spreadsheets (so likely none of the macro capabilities) - same for perl, etc
I think it could be related to drought conditions (or, perhaps flooding) where the hay harvest failed. Google "hay drought midwest south" etc and you will see that hay has gone both ways a few times over the past decades. A list for farmers/others to share info about supply / demand is at http://www.haylist.umn.edu/
Might try looking at medicare.gov and their formulary plan finder - it has a lot of that information. Also look at kff.org - lots of good Medicare/Medicaid info and they have done studies on the drug formularies, etc.