Blood meal price

Blood meal is a protein feed, fed to raise a ration's crude-protein content. On a dry-matter basis it runs about 94% crude protein and 72% TDN, at about 92% dry matter as fed. Those figures come from Kansas State University Extension, Nutritional Composition of Feedstuffs for Beef Cattle (MF3648). TDN spans 61-75% by source. NEl not NRC-tabulated. 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). Blood meal is dried, ground blood collected at cattle and hog packing plants, among the most protein-dense feedstuffs on this board and priced accordingly. Supply follows slaughter volume more than any planted acreage, so a packing plant slowdown moves it faster than weather ever does. Drying method matters: spray-dried blood meal keeps far more of its amino acids usable than the older, cheaper ring-dried process, and buyers pay up for it. Dairy and feedlot nutritionists value it as a rumen-bypass protein supplying lysine other feedstuffs lack, but poor palatability and its iron load keep inclusion rates low. Pet food and aquaculture manufacturers increasingly bid for the same spray-dried supply.

The blood is split before any of it becomes meal. At the packing plant, whole blood is collected in chilling tanks with an anticoagulant, and K-State Research and Extension describes three spray-dried products made from it: plasma and blood cells, produced by separating the two fractions, and spray-dried blood meal, which keeps both. Spray-dried plasma is widely used to stimulate feed intake in weanling pigs, a separate market that takes its share of the raw blood before the blood meal trade sees it. The North American Renderers Association lists three ways to process whole blood: batch-dry, spray and ring-dried rendering. K-State adds the trade-off behind every drying method: heat is needed to kill pathogens, but overheating blood products cuts lysine availability.

Cattle blood can go back to cattle. The FDA's ruminant feed rule bars protein derived from mammalian tissues from cattle feed, but its definition excludes blood and blood products. Cattle blood meal can therefore go into dairy and feedlot rations while ruminant meat and bone meal from the same packers cannot. K-State's feedstuff tables put about 75 percent of blood meal's crude protein in the rumen-undegradable fraction, against about 30 percent for high-protein soybean meal, so ruminant buyers price it against other bypass proteins such as feather meal, not against soybean meal on crude protein.

High in leucine, short on isoleucine. K-State notes blood products run high in leucine but low in isoleucine, blood cells and blood meal most of all. Methionine runs low in all of them, so diets built on them lean on other proteins or feed-grade amino acids to balance. For a swine or poultry formulator that caps what the meal is worth next to its crude protein figure, and what is blood meal walks through the grades. Species of origin matters to swine buyers as well: K-State's guidance favors bovine-derived product, or porcine product tested PCR-negative for porcine epidemic diarrhea virus.

A fertilizer buyer that pays for nitrogen. NARA counts aquaculture, poultry and piglet feed among blood meal's outlets and adds organic fertilizer, bought for its nitrogen. It also notes that poultry plants supply a blood meal of their own for the same feed and fertilizer uses. The fertilizer buyer has no use for the drying-method premium a feed buyer pays, so the fertilizer trade and the feed trade value the same ton on different terms. Our guide to the blood meal market sets these drivers against the board's own price history since 2022.