Start here
How to read this
Every page is built the same way, so once you read one you can read all of them.
The leaderboard
Start here. The leaderboard ranks every feed by-product by what it actually costs to buy a pound of protein or a pound of energy from it, on a dry-matter basis, against corn and soybean meal. A feed under 100 percent of soybean meal on protein is delivering protein cheaper than soybean meal this week. Same idea for corn on energy. This is the calculation a nutritionist does by hand; the page does it for the whole board at once.
The ingredient pages
Each ingredient has a page: its board price over time, the week-over-week and year-over-year moves, and its cost per unit of protein and energy against the benchmark. Every price is labeled with its basis, FOB plant or delivered, because the cheapest board price is not the cheapest fed price once freight is in.
The region pages
Each trade region has a page listing every by-product priced there, cheapest first, with each price's basis. Feed is a freight business, so a by-product that is cheap in Iowa can be dear on the coast. Read the region page for what is available near a plant, and the leaderboard for whether it is a good buy.
The spread charts
The spread pages chart two feeds against each other over time, DDGS versus corn and the like, in dollars per ton. A spread is where you watch the trend. The leaderboard is where you make the comparison, because two feeds at the same dollars per ton can carry very different amounts of nutrient.
The range
Where USDA reports a low-high range, we store the whole range and quote it as a range. A single value is kept only so the charts and the week-over-week math have one number to track. It is the reported average, never an invented midpoint dressed up as a quote.
What we do not say
We do not tell anyone what to feed or when to buy. We report public USDA prices and the cost-per-nutrient math on them. Inclusion limits, effective fiber, palatability and animal response are the nutritionist's call, not a price table's. This is not purchasing, contracting or formulation advice.
New to the vocabulary? The glossary defines every term the brief uses.