Don’t just purchase feed on price, purchase on value. Be sure to know the quality of the ingredients you are buying (see right) as this will determine what you should be paying for it. Feed prices have come down a lot since the highs of last winter. Barley has dropped from €280/tonne to €200/t and soya from €550/t to €460/t today.

This completely changes the relative value of all other feeds. If soya bean meal holds at high prices, it means higher protein feeds are worth more. To calculate the value of any feed, we must look at its energy (UFL) and protein (PDIE) value. Crude protein (CP) is calculated via the amount of nitrogen in feeds and using this to estimate the amount of protein. However, not all nitrogen in a feed can be used by the animal to make protein, so PDIE is a more accurate figure – this is the amount of protein the animal will get from a kilo of dry matter of the feed.

Feeds, where their market value is under the relative value, are good deals for a farmer – currently soya hulls, rapeseed meal and maize gluten.