DDGS market: why distillers grains prices track ethanol

The US DDGS market runs on ethanol: distillers dried grains come off dry-grind ethanol plants, and USDA's weekly feedstuffs board puts them at $193 per ton as of Oct 12, 2026 (national median across 11 FOB plant regions, USDA), up 28% from $151 a year earlier.

DDGS prices track ethanol because DDGS is a co-product of ethanol, not a crop grown on its own. Nobody plants a field of DDGS. It exists only when an ethanol plant runs corn, so how much of it comes to market, and roughly what it is worth, follows the ethanol business more than the feed business.

Supply is set by the plants, not by feeders

A dry-mill ethanol plant turns each bushel of corn into ethanol, corn oil and distillers grains together. University of Illinois farmdoc daily research puts the ethanol yield near 3 gallons a bushel, and finds the DDGS yield fell from 17.34 pounds a bushel in October 2014 to a low of 14.78 in June 2024 as plants pulled more corn oil out of the same kernel. So the amount of DDGS on the market is set by how hard the plants are running, not by how much cattle feeders want that week.

Those plants sit in the Midwest. On EIA's weekly survey, which this site carries on the DDGS price page, the Midwest region (PADD 2) made about 95 percent of US fuel ethanol in 2025, and national output averaged 1,005 thousand barrels a day in 2022, 1,024 in 2023, 1,053 in 2024 and 1,077 in 2025. When plants run hard, DDGS is plentiful. When they slow or idle, the feed gets scarce whatever the demand from feedlots.

Plant economics in one paragraph

What decides how hard plants run is their margin, and the margin is mostly the price of ethanol and corn oil against the cost of corn. When fuel ethanol and corn oil pay well over the corn bill, plants run flat out and push distillers grains out as a side stream they would rather sell than store. When the margin is thin, run rates ease and DDGS supply tightens with them. The same farmdoc work shows plants raising ethanol and corn oil yields at the expense of DDGS, with corn oil rising from 0.48 to 0.94 pounds a bushel between December 2014 and December 2024. A buyer watching DDGS is really watching a fuel and an oil market as much as a feed one.

What the board shows since 2022

The board's DDGS figure is the national median of USDA's FOB plant quotes, and its annual averages show how far the market has come down: $252 a ton in 2022, $229 in 2023, $165 in 2024 and $153 in 2025. Corn fell with it. The board's corn benchmark, USDA's plant input cost, averaged $209 a ton in 2023, $149 in 2024 and $152 in 2025.

Against corn, DDGS trades in a band rather than at a fixed ratio. Since July 2022, when the corn benchmark starts, DDGS has run from 89 percent to 145 percent of corn's price per ton, at a median of 106 percent, and it sold below corn in 56 of the 209 weekly reports. By year the ratio averaged 110 percent in 2023 and 2024 and 101 percent in 2025. On protein it has usually been the cheaper source: a pound of crude protein cost less in DDGS than in soybean meal in 166 of those 209 weeks, at a median of 94 percent of soybean meal's cost.

The corn floor and the export bid

Corn anchors the other side. Because DDGS competes with corn in the ration, its price rarely strays far from corn's value as feed, and the band above is what that has meant in practice. Buyers talk about DDGS as a percentage of corn for the same reason: cheap when the ratio is low, dear when it is high.

Exports are the third pull. The Renewable Fuels Association's summary of Census trade data counts 11.6 million metric tons of US distillers grains exported in 2025, down 4 percent from 12 million in 2024 and about 36 percent of what US plants made. Mexico, South Korea and Vietnam were the top destinations. Foreign buyers compete with domestic feeders for the same supply and can hold up the price in a soft home market.

Where DDGS is cheapest: freight

DDGS is made in the Corn Belt and fed everywhere, so the board's regional quotes sit on a freight ladder away from the plants. Against Iowa's FOB plant quote, California's FOB quote averaged $76 to $106 a ton higher in each year from 2022 to 2025, and the Pacific Northwest's delivered quote $93 to $110 higher. Minnesota, Wisconsin and South Dakota stayed within $13 of Iowa on annual average. The DDGS price page carries every region's latest quote in its by-region table, and FOB plant vs delivered covers what freight does to a fed price.

Worked example: reading the latest board

The arithmetic is easy to check with round numbers. DDGS at $190 a ton against corn at $170 is 112 percent of corn per ton. Both carry about 88 percent TDN on a dry-matter basis in this site's tables, but DDGS is drier, 90 percent dry matter against corn's 87.9, so per pound of energy the gap narrows: $190 divided by 0.90 is $211 per ton of dry matter, against $193 for corn, or 109 percent. Long swings in the chart usually line up with the ethanol margin and the corn market rather than with anything happening in the barn.

The Ration reports the DDGS price and describes what drives it. It does not forecast DDGS prices, corn prices or ethanol production.