Methodology

How the data is collected

Prices come off four public USDA Agricultural Marketing Service reports, pulled on a fixed schedule: the National Grain and Oilseed Processor Feedstuff report, the National Mill-Feeds and Miscellaneous Feedstuff report, the National Animal By-Product Feedstuff report, and the National Weekly Grain Co-Products report. Every figure comes straight off a structured report row. The ingredient, trade region and freight basis on each row are mapped to a fixed vocabulary; a value that does not map is logged and skipped, never guessed, because one meal's price read under another meal's name is a wrong number to a buyer.

Each pull covers a trailing window, not just the newest week, and a missed run backfills on the next one. Where one region quotes an ingredient at several transport modes the same week, the lines are combined into one reading, the average of the quotes with the full range kept, rather than letting one mode overwrite another.

The substitution leaderboard, step by step

This is the site's flagship and the one calculation worth spelling out. For each ingredient we take its board price per ton and do four things. First, put it on a dry-matter basis by dividing by the feed's dry-matter fraction, so a wet feed and a dry feed are compared on nutrient, not on water. Second, divide the dry-matter price by the pounds of crude protein in a ton of dry matter to get a cost per pound of protein. Third, divide by the pounds of TDN to get a cost per pound of energy. Fourth, where a primary source publishes net energy for lactation, divide by the megacalories in a ton of dry matter for a cost per megacalorie. Every ingredient is then ranked against corn on energy and soybean meal on protein.

The nutrient coefficients, and their sources

The protein, energy and dry-matter figures that drive the math are book values, not our estimates, and each is verified against a named public feed-composition table at build. The sources are the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension feed tables (FSA-3043 and FSA-4013), Colorado State University Extension fact sheet 1.615, Kansas State University Extension MF3648, the Virginia Cooperative Extension Agronomy Handbook, the Auburn University 2014 feed composition tables, feedtables.com and Feedipedia (INRA, CIRAD and FAO), and the NRC and NASEM nutrient-requirement tables those draw on. Each ingredient page names the table behind its figures. Where sources disagree, we say so and use a defensible midpoint. An ingredient for which no dry-matter-basis coefficient could be verified is priced and tracked but not scored on the leaderboard, and a few net-energy values that exist only in a non-NRC system are left off rather than converted loosely, so those feeds are ranked on TDN alone.

The corn and soybean-meal benchmark

Corn is the energy anchor and soybean meal is the protein anchor. The corn price is the US number two yellow input cost from the Grain Co-Products report, quoted per bushel and converted to a per-ton, as-fed price. Soybean meal is the FOB price from the processor report. Every by-product's cost per unit of nutrient is shown as a percent of the matching benchmark, so a reading under 100 percent means the by-product is the cheaper source of that nutrient this week.

FOB plant versus delivered

Every price is labeled with its basis. FOB plant is at the plant gate before freight; delivered is at the mill or farm with freight in. The two are different numbers for the same feed and are never compared as if they were the same. This site does not carry a freight data feed, so it does not estimate a delivered price from an FOB one; it reports each basis as USDA publishes it.

Median, not average, for the baselines

Where a series has enough history, the five-year comparison is the current value against the median of that same calendar week across the prior years. Median, not average, so one freak year does not skew the baseline. The representative price used on the leaderboard for an ingredient is the median across the regions reporting it that week, so one thin regional quote does not swing the ranking.

The history floor

USDA migrated these feedstuffs reports to its current reporting platform in 2022, so the machine-readable history starts in early 2022, not five full years back. We report the real floor and never pad it. Most series carry enough history for a real vs-normal band; where a series is too young, the comparison simply does not appear.

What we do not compute

We do not forecast prices or supply. We do not recommend a ration, an inclusion rate, or a purchase. Where a public number does not exist, the site says so rather than substituting an estimate. Charts and statistics on this site are free to republish with visible attribution and a link back.

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