About
About The Ration
The feedstuffs market in one screen: the nutrient-cost screening board, 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 feedstuffs market: a nutrient-cost screening board that ranks every feedstuff 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 four 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. Where a single figure is needed, the representative price is a separately calculated and clearly labeled cross-region median, not the published range flattened into an invented midpoint. 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 feedstuff 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 where the data comes from and how often it refreshes on the methodology page.