How this is built
Methodology
What data The Ration pulls, where it comes from, and how often it refreshes.
What we pull, and from where
Prices come off four USDA Agricultural Marketing Service reports, read through the AMS reporting API, all published weekly:
- the National Grain and Oilseed Processor Feedstuff report, the processor meals including soybean meal, plus the corn input cost,
- the National Mill-Feeds and Miscellaneous Feedstuff report,
- the National Animal By-Product Feedstuff report,
- and the National Weekly Grain Co-Products report, DDGS and the other ethanol and milling co-products.
Each report quotes prices per ton by trade region and freight basis (FOB plant or delivered), and every price on the site keeps the region and basis it was published with. One context series rides alongside the prices: EIA's weekly fuel-ethanol production for the US and the Midwest (PADD 2). DDGS is a co-product of dry-mill ethanol, so the DDGS hub shows production as a supply backdrop, never as a price-driver claim.
The nutrient figures
The protein, energy and dry-matter figures behind the cost-per-nutrient board are book values from public feed-composition tables, not our estimates: the University of Arkansas Extension feed tables, Colorado State, Kansas State and Virginia Extension publications, the Auburn feed composition tables, Feedipedia and feedtables.com, and the NRC and NASEM tables those draw on. They are fixed reference data, not a scheduled pull, and each ingredient page names the table behind its figures.
How often
The pull runs weekly, ahead of the Wednesday brief. Each pull covers a trailing window, not just the newest week, so a missed run backfills on the next one. USDA moved these reports to its current reporting platform in 2022, so the machine-readable history starts in early 2022. Every data page carries two dates: "data through" is the newest reading in the data itself, and "page updated" is when the page was last rebuilt.
For how to read the numbers once they are in front of you, see how to read this.
Republishing our charts and statistics
The charts and statistics on The Ration are free to republish. Use them in an article, a report, a class, a presentation, or a post — you do not need to ask us first. We ask one thing in return: credit The Ration with a visible link back to the page you took the figure or chart from, and keep that link live.
Every chart has an Embed chart button with a snippet you can paste straight into a web page. Because it points at the live image, the chart you embed today keeps updating itself as new data lands — you never have to swap in a fresh screenshot. Every data page, guide, and issue has a Cite button that hands you a ready-made citation line, including the date the data runs through. If you are quoting a number, keep that date: it is what tells your reader how current the figure is.