About
About The Ration
The feed by-products market in one screen: the substitution leaderboard, prices by ingredient and region, and the corn and soybean-meal benchmarks, from the public record, with no formulation advice attached.
What this is
The Ration is a weekly brief plus a set of always-current data pages on the US feed by-products market: a substitution leaderboard that ranks every by-product by cost per unit of protein and energy, prices by ingredient and by trade region, and the corn and soybean-meal benchmarks the whole market is priced against. It is built for feed-mill buyers, dairy and feedlot nutritionists, and ingredient merchandisers, who make the substitution call every week and would rather not run the math by hand across six separate USDA reports.
Who writes it
The Ration is published by Alex Willen. The data pages are generated from the public USDA record on a fixed schedule; the weekly brief reads what moved and writes it up in plain English. Every price traces back to the government report that published it, and every nutrient coefficient behind the leaderboard traces to a named, public feed-composition table.
Where the numbers come from
Prices come from the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service feedstuffs and grain co-products reports. The nutrient coefficients that turn a price into a cost per unit of protein or energy are book values from published extension-service and NRC feed-composition tables, each cited on the methodology page. Prices are reported exactly as USDA publishes them, as ranges where USDA gives a range, never flattened to an invented number. Nothing here is estimated or sourced from a private vendor.
Where we sit
The feed trade has private price services and formulation software. The Ration is the free, public-data layer beneath them: it reports USDA's own numbers and does the one calculation every buyer wants, the cost per unit of nutrient, out in the open.
What we will and will not do
We report public USDA data and the cost-per-nutrient math on it. We do not forecast prices. We never tell a reader what to feed, when to buy, or how to formulate a ration. A by-product that is the cheapest protein this week is reported as exactly that, a price fact; whether it belongs in a given ration is the nutritionist's call. We are not purchasing, contracting or formulation advice.
New here? Start with how to read this, or see the exact math behind the leaderboard on the methodology page.