Alfalfa meal price

Alfalfa meal is a fiber source, fed for effective fiber and gut fill more than for nutrients. On a dry-matter basis it runs about 18.5% crude protein and 61% TDN, at about 90% dry matter as fed. Those figures come from Colorado State University Extension, Feed Composition for Cattle and Sheep (Fact Sheet 1.615). Dehydrated, 17% grade. NEl not NRC-tabulated (INRA-only), so energy is ranked on TDN. The leaderboard uses them to convert each USDA report week's board price into a cost per pound of protein and per pound of energy, so it can be ranked against corn and soybean meal. Prices are quoted per ton, and the cheapest board price is not the cheapest fed price once freight and moisture are counted (see the FOB-vs-delivered guide). Alfalfa meal is ground, dehydrated alfalfa hay, grown mostly under irrigation in the West and the Great Plains, where a field gets more cuttings than rain-fed ground allows. Its price tracks the alfalfa hay market, moving on irrigation water supply, competing export demand for compressed hay bales, and the natural gas cost of drying at a dehydration plant. Poultry and rabbit feed formulators buy it as much for its xanthophyll, the pigment that colors egg yolks and broiler skin, as for its protein, so color and leaf content set the grade more than a crude protein number does.

The meal and the pellet come out of the same drum. EPA's profile of alfalfa dehydrating plants traces one line: standing alfalfa is windrowed, chopped in the field, hauled to the plant, dried in a direct-fired rotary drum, ground to meal in a hammermill and then pelleted. EPA notes the product is most often stored and shipped as pellets, which may be ground back into meal for sale in that form. So alfalfa meal has no supply of its own. It is a slice of the same dehydrator output quoted on the alfalfa pellets page, and both answer to the same plant costs.

A dryer that pays to boil off water. The same EPA profile has chopped alfalfa entering the drum at about 30 to 70 percent moisture and leaving at about 6 to 12 percent, with field wilting set as a balance between energy use, trucking and dryer capacity. Every point of moisture left in the chop is water the plant burns fuel to evaporate, and wet chop is heavy freight, which keeps a plant close to the fields that feed it. Those fields could as easily be baled, and USDA Market News reports dehydrated pellets inside its state hay reports, beside sun-cured pellets and baled alfalfa graded by fiber and relative feed value. What drives alfalfa pellet prices covers that hay side.

Made in summer, fed in winter. An archived Kansas State University bulletin on the dehydrating industry found production limited to about six months of the year in Kansas while peak use came in winter, so plants stored meal made early in the season for blending later. The same bulletin found freshly dehydrated alfalfa holds far more of the green plant's carotene than sun-cured hay, but that both lose it steadily in storage, faster when the warehouse is warm. A buyer paying for vitamin value is buying something that fades the longer it sits.

Poultry buys it for color, not protein. University of Kentucky poultry specialist Jacquie Jacob notes that high fiber limits alfalfa in single-stomach diets, yet it is a natural source of the xanthophylls that yellow chicken skin and egg yolks. High-alfalfa diets have also been used to molt laying hens. That puts poultry demand on a pigment and fiber footing, not protein parity with soybean meal. The Nebraska Alfalfa Dehydrators Association sells to dairies, feedlots, horse owners and poultry flocks, plus specialty buyers feeding rabbits, game animals, buffalo, deer, ostrich and emu, on guaranteed protein grades of 15, 17 and 20 percent. It also markets dehy as a natural fertilizer, a buyer outside the feed trade entirely.