Meat and bone meal price

Meat and bone meal is a protein feed, fed to raise a ration's crude-protein content. On a dry-matter basis it runs about 55% crude protein and 71% TDN, at about 94% dry matter as fed. Those figures come from Colorado State University Extension, Feed Composition for Cattle and Sheep (Fact Sheet 1.615). Ruminant, ~50-55% CP. No ruminant NEl source found, 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). Meat and bone meal is rendered from bones and trimmings left after slaughter that are not used for human food, at plants drawing on both cattle and hog slaughter streams. The defining fact for any buyer is the FDA's ruminant feed ban: meal derived from ruminants cannot legally be fed back to cattle or other ruminants, a rule from BSE risk, which pushes most ruminant-derived meal into swine, poultry and pet food rations instead. Price follows slaughter volume and competes with the tallow rendered from the same batch. Protein quality varies more than in a plant meal, since the bone-to-tissue ratio is never quite identical run to run.

What separates this market from a plant meal is that nobody decides to produce it. Soybean meal supply answers to a planting decision and a crush margin; rendered protein is whatever comes off the kill floor. Volume is set by cattle and hog slaughter throughput, which answers to meat demand and to where the cattle herd sits in its own multi-year cycle, and it is close to unresponsive to the meal's own price. A renderer facing a strong bid cannot run more raw material than the packers send, so supply is nearly vertical in the short run and the price does the adjusting.

The second driver is the other half of the batch. Every load of raw material yields both protein meal and fat, and the fat side has been repriced by renewable diesel: tallow and used cooking oil now compete for a fuel outlet that did not exist at scale a decade ago. When fat values are strong, rendering margins improve and plants pull harder on available raw material, which puts more meal into the market as a side effect of chasing the fat. Reading meat and bone meal without watching the fat complex misses the part of the economics that is actually moving.

On the demand side there are three buyers and they do not bid alike. Pet food takes the cleanest, highest-protein material and pays a premium for consistency, which pulls the best product out of the feed market entirely. Swine and poultry rations take most of the rest, valuing it against soybean meal on protein and against dicalcium phosphate on the phosphorus the bone fraction carries, which is a real part of the value a crude protein comparison misses. Export buyers in Asia and Latin America take the balance for poultry, swine and aquaculture feed, so a currency move or a change in an importing country's rules can shift the domestic price with nothing having changed at home.

Seasonality follows the kill. Slaughter throughput builds through the fall, so raw material is most plentiful in the back half of the year, and weather that slows plant operations tightens the supply of a product that cannot be stockpiled indefinitely without quality loss. USDA Market News reports the rendered product prices this page tracks, alongside the tallow and other rendered fat quotes that move with them.