What is blood meal?

Blood meal is dried, ground blood collected at cattle and hog packing plants. It is among the most protein-dense feedstuffs traded, roughly 90 percent crude protein or more on a dry-matter basis, and it is bought in small amounts for specific jobs rather than as a bulk protein. Two things about it matter more than the headline number: how it was dried, and what animal it came from.

How it is made

Blood is collected at the kill floor, sent to a rendering operation, and dried into a powder. The drying method is the whole story on quality. Ring drying and older high-heat methods are cheaper and harder on the protein, damaging lysine in the process. Spray drying and flash drying use less heat contact and keep far more of the amino acids available to the animal, so buyers pay up for spray-dried material and specify it in contracts. Two loads with the same crude protein on the tag can feed very differently.

Supply comes off slaughter volume and nothing else. There is no acreage decision behind blood meal, no planting intention report, no weather market. A packing plant slowdown, a labor dispute or a run of light cattle moves this feed faster than anything happening in a field.

Protein, and the limits on using it

This site scores blood meal at 94 percent crude protein on a dry-matter basis, cross-checked across Kansas State, Colorado State and Feedipedia tables. Its energy is the shakier figure: TDN estimates for it run anywhere from about 61 to 75 percent depending on which table you read, which is why the cost-per-energy side of the board treats it with more caution than the protein side. Kansas State University Extension tabulates it among the rendered protein feedstuffs.

What ruminant nutritionists actually want from it is rumen-undegradable protein rich in lysine. Most plant proteins available to a dairy or feedlot are short on lysine, and blood meal covers that gap in a way few feedstuffs can, which is why it often gets paired with feather meal, whose amino acid profile is poor in exactly the places blood meal is strong. Two things cap how much goes in. It is unpalatable, so cattle will back off feed if a ration carries too much, and it is very high in iron, which is not a nutrient anyone is short of.

Why USDA quotes it twice

The feedstuffs reports carry ruminant and porcine blood meal as separate series, across the Central US, Minnesota, the Eastern Corn Belt, the Southern Plains and California. That split is not cosmetic. Buyers specify the stream, because a pet food formulator, an aquaculture mill and a ruminant feeder each have their own reasons to care what animal the material came from, and some export markets restrict origin outright. The two quotes can and do diverge.

The market it competes in

Pet food and aquaculture are the bidders that set the ceiling. Both want spray-dried, high-availability protein and neither is buying against a cattle ration's cost per pound of crude protein, so when those industries are running hard the feed trade gets outbid for the better material. That is the standing structure of this market: a limited supply tied to slaughter, a quality split that concentrates demand on part of it, and buyers outside the feed business with more room to pay.

A separate outlet sits in lawn and garden, where blood meal is sold as a fast-acting nitrogen fertilizer, typically labeled around 12 percent nitrogen. The volumes are small next to feed. The bags still compete for the same rendered material.

Worked example: reading the board

The chart above is the live blood meal board price in dollars per ton. Read the latest point as this week's price, then take it to the cost-per-protein board, which converts it to a cost per pound of crude protein on a dry-matter basis. Blood meal frequently screens as cheap protein there, and the board separates the animal protein category from the oilseed meals for exactly that reason: crude protein counts nitrogen, not palatability, not amino acid availability, and not what a drying method did to the lysine. Read the price, then read the category.

The Ration reports the USDA blood meal price as published, per ton, by stream and basis, and ranks it on cost per unit of nutrient. That is a price screen on one nutrient, not a feeding recommendation: inclusion limits, amino acid balance and processing quality are the nutritionist's call, not a price table's.