Pricing feed ingredients on the basis of their nutritional value

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 Windows (R) application named SESAME. The software can be used (1) to rapidly and accurately identify commodity purchasing opportunities, and (2) to benchmark feed costs from nutrient requirements and nutrient unit prices.