Establishing an Economical Value for By-Product Feeds

摘要

In many instances, nutritionists, feed manufacturers, dairy producers, and their advisors need an estimate of what a feed is worth on a nutritional basis to facilitate the formulation of balanced diets and the purchase of appropriate and price competitive feedstuffs. Up until now, all methods used shared common flaws. We derived a maximum likelihood method that uses composition and prices of all feedstuffs traded in a given market to estimate unit costs of nutrients and break-even prices of feedstuffs. The method was programmed as a Windows6 application named SESAME. The software can be used to: (1) rapidly and accurately identify commodity purchasing opportunities, and (2) benchmark feed costs from nutrient requirements and nutrient unit prices.