What is a feedstuff?

A feedstuff is any ingredient fed to animals for the nutrients it supplies. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it simply as food for livestock, and animal scientists at Oregon State University put it as "a component of a ration or a diet that serves one or more functions." Hay, pasture, grain, protein meals, minerals and vitamins all count.

In the feed trade the word usually means something narrower: the processed protein, energy and fiber ingredients that come out of ethanol plants, mills, oilseed crushers and rendering plants, bought by the ton and priced against corn and soybean meal. That narrower sense is the one USDA's weekly feedstuff reports use, and it is the market this site prices.

The textbook definition: eight classes of feedstuffs

Nutritionists sort feedstuffs into eight classes by composition and use, under the International Feed Nomenclature. A reference chapter by L.E. Harris for the FAO lists them:

1. Dry forages and roughages: hay, straw, hulls and other feeds over 18 percent crude fiber on a dry basis.
2. Pasture, range plants and forages fed green.
3. Silages.
4. Energy feeds: under 20 percent protein and under 18 percent crude fiber on a dry basis, such as grain and mill feeds.
5. Protein supplements: 20 percent protein or more on a dry basis, from animal origin or from oil meals and gluten.
6. Mineral supplements.
7. Vitamin supplements.
8. Additives: antibiotics, coloring materials, flavors and medications.

The same chapter calls the lines arbitrary at the edges. A feed that straddles two classes is placed by its most common use, so a bran sample over 18 percent fiber and over 20 percent protein still files as a forage if that is how it gets fed.

Everything on this site's board falls in three of the eight. Soybean and cottonseed hulls and the alfalfa products are class 1 roughages. Corn and hominy feed are class 4 energy feeds. Soybean meal, cottonseed meal, corn gluten meal, DDGS and the rendered meals are class 5 protein supplements.

How the trade uses the word

On a feed buyer's desk, and in USDA's market reports, "feedstuff" marks out a middle ground between two other kinds of ingredient.

Straight grains sit on one side: corn, sorghum, barley and wheat fed as they come from the field, whole or ground. They are crops in their own right, planted on a farmer's acreage decision and priced off the grain markets by the bushel. On this site corn and soybeans appear as benchmarks, the energy and protein yardsticks every feedstuff is measured against.

Specialty ingredients sit on the other: vitamins, trace minerals, feed-grade amino acids such as lysine and methionine, enzymes and other additives. They go into a ration by the pound or less, usually blended into a premix, and they are bought on specification rather than by the ton. None of them appears on USDA's feedstuff reports.

Feedstuffs in the trade sense are what lies between: ingredients bought by the ton for protein, energy or fiber, most of them co-products of a plant built to make something else.

• Ethanol plants: DDGS and wet distillers grains.
• Corn mills: corn gluten feed and corn gluten meal from wet mills, hominy feed from dry mills.
• Oilseed crushers: soybean meal, soybean hulls, cottonseed meal, cottonseed hulls, canola meal, sunflower meal, linseed meal and safflower meal.
• Cotton gins: whole cottonseed.
• Flour and rice mills: wheat middlings, wheat millrun and rice bran.
• Alfalfa dehydrators and almond hullers: alfalfa meal, alfalfa pellets and almond hulls.
• Rendering plants: meat and bone meal, feather meal and blood meal.

The difference matters for price. A straight grain's supply answers to planting decisions and the weather. A feedstuff's supply answers to the product the plant was built for: ethanol decides how much DDGS exists, sweetener and starch demand decide corn gluten meal, flour milling decides wheat middlings and slaughter decides blood meal. A strong feed bid does little to add tons. The market guides take that one ingredient at a time: the DDGS market, the corn gluten meal market, the alfalfa pellets market and the blood meal market.

How USDA prices feedstuffs

USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service publishes the public price record for this market every week, in four reports: the Grain and Oilseed Processor Feedstuff report, the Mill-Feeds and Miscellaneous Feedstuff report, a report on rendered animal proteins and the Grain Co-Products report. Each line is a price per short ton of 2,000 pounds, as fed, quoted either FOB the plant or delivered to a named market, by trade region and often against a protein spec. Reading a feedstuffs report goes through a line word by word, FOB plant vs delivered covers the freight point, and how to convert feed prices turns a per-ton quote into per kilogram, per hundredweight or per pound of protein.

The board above takes every feedstuff USDA priced in the latest report week and ranks it by what a pound of crude protein costs on a dry-matter basis, against soybean meal. Its Category column keeps the groups apart: plant protein meals, grain co-products, animal proteins and fiber and forage feeds do different jobs in a ration even when their protein costs line up.

Worked example: a feedstuff against the grain and the meal it replaces

DDGS shows the idea well, because it does both jobs at once: it replaces part of the corn in a ration for energy and part of the soybean meal for protein.

The arithmetic behind those figures is short. Take a feedstuff at $180 a ton that is 90 percent dry matter and 25 percent crude protein on a dry-matter basis. Its dry matter costs $180 divided by 0.90, or $200 a ton. A ton of dry matter holds 2,000 times 0.25, or 500 pounds of protein, so the protein costs $200 divided by 500: $0.40 a pound. Run the same steps on soybean meal and the two can be compared on the nutrient rather than the ton. How to compare feed ingredients on protein and energy does the energy side the same way.

The Ration reports these prices as USDA publishes them and does the cost-per-nutrient math. It does not forecast prices or say what to feed.