One more thing.purina, nutrena, most of the major brands have a set formula for each type of feed i.e. horse feeds strategy , senior, omeleneetc. Chickens whatever..they meet the nutritional requirements at each mill with the easiest to source best cost that meets the nutritional requirements..here in la that means more rice and soy.. if it is a year with a horrible wheat harvest you see more corn oats or barley..but the nutritional output will match the tag..
Nutrena got hard to get last year or was different when cargill had a fire and lost part of a mill..been rebuilt and now no issue but for a while horse feed was limited or cane from alabama or fla mill
Unless they have changed dramatically since 1982 (yes, 40 years ago), Cargill does NOT have a set formula for each product that they follow every single day.
In fact, the feed formulas changed DAILY back then, and I would figure they still do today.
What does not change is the guaranteed crude analysis data. The MINIMUMS listed there do not change. Every bag will meet or exceed those minimums.
How do I know this?
Because when I was in graduate school in the early 1980s, I had a neat little part time job at the huge Cargill facility in south Memphis.
This was back in the days when few people outside of the PhD ranks knew how to operate a computer.
so I got a job where I would go into the Cargill office about 5:30am.
I would get on the computer and gather up all the data files - chemical analyses of the grain loads Cargill had accepted from farmers the day before, agricultural commodoties data from the day before for the grains they used in their products, etc.
Then I had mainframe batch programs I would run, to crunch all that data. When the computer had finished running those programs, it would spit out the specific day’s formulary for producing each of the many feed products Cargill manufactured.
I would then forward that data on to the specific mills where they used the data feom the “mother ship” to tweak the formula for that day.
i don’t think the daily changes amounted to a whole lot. But if, for example, they could meet the guaranteed results posted on the bag using either oats or wheat, and wheat happened to be cheaper that day than oats, then they would order the factories to use more wheat and less oats that day.
Or if there was a shortage of wheat, they might direct the factories to use more oats and less wheat.
It was that kind of changes, most days. Not something to be concerned about, as an end user. But something that mattered considerably when you were a manufacturer pressing out thousands of tons of feed each day.
