Feather meal price

Feather meal is a protein feed, fed to raise a ration's crude-protein content. On a dry-matter basis it runs about 88% crude protein and 71% TDN, at about 92% dry matter as fed. Those figures come from Kansas State University Extension, Nutritional Composition of Feedstuffs for Beef Cattle (MF3648). Hydrolyzed; high CP but lower digestibility. TDN spans 68-79% 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). Feather meal comes from hydrolyzing poultry feathers, keratin broken down under pressure and heat until it digests, at rendering plants clustered near the broiler belt of Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama and the rest of the Southeast. Supply tracks broiler slaughter volume, not any crop. Its crude protein reads among the highest on this board, second only to blood meal, but that number overstates real feeding value: feather protein is naturally short on lysine and methionine, and how well it digests depends on cooking, since overcooking destroys amino acids while undercooking leaves keratin the animal cannot break down. Pet food and aquaculture buyers compete hardest for the better-processed material.

Supply is counted in birds, not acres. Feathers come off at the processing plant, so feather meal volume follows poultry slaughter and nothing a renderer decides. USDA's National Agricultural Statistics Service tracks that kill in its monthly Poultry Slaughter report, the number of chickens, turkeys and other poultry slaughtered under federal inspection, which covers over 99 percent of US slaughter. USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service posts preliminary weekly totals in between. Those counts are the closest public read on raw feather supply, and they move with the poultry industry's own production plans, not with what feather meal is worth.

Feathers are only part of the renderer's load. The same kill supplies the tissue renderers turn into poultry meal and poultry fat, and the North American Renderers Association notes that poultry fat goes into biofuel and animal feed. A poultry renderer's return on a day's raw material rests on those protein and fat streams as well as on feathers. Because the feathers arrive whether or not the meal is worth much, feather meal has to clear at whatever the market will pay.

Bought as bypass protein, discounted as crude protein. K-State Research and Extension's feedstuff tables put about 71 percent of feather meal's crude protein in the rumen-undegradable fraction, against about 30 percent for high-protein soybean meal. That is why dairy and feedlot nutritionists buy it, pricing it against other bypass proteins such as blood meal rather than against soybean meal on crude protein alone. As a poultry product it sits outside the FDA rule that bars protein derived from mammalian tissues from cattle feed. Poultry and swine formulators, facing a protein that Feedipedia describes as deficient in lysine, methionine, histidine and tryptophan (the gaps our feather meal guide covers), take it only at a discount to its crude protein figure.

Pet food and fertilizer bid on other terms. NARA lists poultry, aquaculture, livestock and pet food among feather meal's feed outlets, and credits it with improving fur quality, a selling point in pet food that has nothing to do with a livestock ration's amino acid math. NARA adds organic fertilizer as another outlet, where feather meal is bought for nitrogen rather than digestible amino acids. That buyer pays for nitrogen, not for how well a batch was cooked, so it bids on different terms from the feed trade.