The run away cost of feed

[bigspringshatchery]

I gotta go buy feed today. I'll post if it's went up where I get mine. Praying it hasn't.

 

[Olive Hill]

I'm surprised feed is so high in Nebraska. I'd have expected it to be one of the cheaper areas of the country to get it in bulk.

At any rate, this is what happens when we start thinking corn can save the world and put it in everything we manufacture. And then the rest of the world wants to follow in our footsteps and before we know it every year, no matter the quality of the harvest, is a "shortage" year. There's something mighty wrong when "they" are bellyaching about the harvest shortage here in the states in a year where that harvest was projected to be the third largest on record despite some poor yields in certain regions.

Farmers know there will be good years and there will be bad years, you should plan for the good years to carry you over through the bad ones. Unfortunately that memo never got to the "top" and they're piddling away the good harvests before the next year's seeds are in the ground.


Quote:
Good news for grain farmers; bad news for livestock farmers.

 

[Olive Hill]

Quote:
If you buy commercial bagged feed there's likely to be a delay in the price hike, it has to make it's way down the pipe. If you're buying locally milled stuff, it'll probably reflect market.

 

[enola]

I didn't read the entire article, no time right now........

But, I guess I am lucky, Layena in my neck of the woods is $12.39 as of last week.

But, it is going up slowly but surely. My prices will have to go up too, unfortunately.

As soon as my 2 year old hens cycle out of laying, they will be the first to go.

Next will be the brown egg layers that I don't use for breeding.

I also will not be keeping any roosters from my crosses to produce pullets that lay green eggs.

And my project for next year, olive egger bantams, is currently on hold.

But, that will still leave me with 40 or so happy hens.

 

[NellaBean]

I noticed Layena went up about a buck a bag or so. I think its up to about $14/bag here these days. I don't normally feed layena, but buy it when I run out between Co-op trips. 16% layer at the co-op is $10.50 a bag. I think it used to be $9.50 a couple months back. 20% layer is about $12.50 a bag....maybe closer to $13 these days. I think it used to be a buck or so cheaper also. I'm already getting more eggs than I know what to do with, so switched back to 16% from 20%.

 

[motoclown]

I blame GMOs and Monsanto.*(Genetically Modified Organisms)
70% of the corn grown in the USA is gmo corn............
We are buying organic feed next time.
We didn't buy organic the first time we bought feed, but for sure, we are going organic soon as this bag of feed is empty.

A graph of gmo use..........

 

[The Kibble Goddess]

Anybody read Omnivore's Delimma, by Michael Pollan or "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, A Year of Food Life," by Barbara Kinsolver? Real eye openers on what is happening with our food production and supply, and the effects, intended and un-intended, of government intervention in farming. Pollan's history of corn and how it became central to farming, animal feed, human feed, and government is quite a read.

 

[NonnasBabies]

I buy Nutrena feed from our feed store and it's gone up about $1.25 in the past couple of months. I was paying $10.50 now $11.75. Still cheaper than going to TSC though.

Missi

 

[shortstaque]

Quote:
Yeah, both great books on many levels. Watch the documentary Food Inc if you don't have time to read Omnivore's Dilemna, it covers much of the same info. Some great reporting in the book and the movie. You'll never look at the food you eat in the same way again.

Back to the topic, my feed bill has been pretty consistent per bag at the local Agway, but since moving the chickens into the tractor they only eat 1/2 to 2/3 as much as they used to. That will change in the winter of course, but I'm hoping to have some cover crops in to help out with food cost straight away in the spring. Also, I'm looking into growing more of my own stuff to supplement with.

Some links I've looked at to this end:
http://www.sustainablechicken.com/
http://www.themodernhomestead.us/article/Homegrown.html

and on mixing your own
http://www.backyardpoultrymag.com/issues/1/1-4/Harvey_Ussery.html

 

[poltroon]

A new form of futures trading, commodity index funds, started by Goldman Sachs has also affected the price of grains in the last few years.

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article21186.html

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: The wheat markets, in particular, in this country are the outcome of a process of development of over 150 years. And that is why, from about 1903 to 2003, the real price of wheat in this country has gone down. And this was one of the great reasons for America’s great twentieth century, the fact that we had cheap food, we had cheap bread. And Goldman, in 1991, came up with a new idea and a new product, which, as I said before, completely restructured this market and completely threw it out of whack.

But before we go there, we just have to maybe review for a second a little bit about how these markets worked and what kept that wheat price stabilized. And Juan, you mentioned the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, this kind of obscure syndicate in the Midwest, which is where the price of this particular kind of wheat, hard red spring wheat, which is the most widely traded wheat in the world, and it’s the most widely exported wheat from the American continent—we kind of set the world price on this wheat. This is where it happens. What’s the history of that price being stabilized is you have, traditionally, in the wheat futures market, two kinds of players: one of the farmers and the millers and the warehousemen—right? And this, of course, includes players like Domino’s Pizza and Sara Lee and General Mills, very large business, capitalist stakes are in this wheat market, right? And they are called bona fide hedgers, because they’re actually buying and selling real wheat. As the price fluctuates in the futures markets, you also traditionally have speculators in this market, people who don’t want wheat, who wouldn’t have any place to put it if they bought it, but they’re making money off buy orders and sell orders, as the price fluctuates each day, and hopefully they’re bringing in some money for themselves every day. That’s the idea.

Now, the key here is that both the bona fide hedgers and the speculators, every time they buy, they’re also selling, and every time they sell, they eventually buy. So their positions are cleared off at the end of the day, OK? Goldman, we have to understand, and a lot of these banks, are not interested in the particular structure of any of these markets. I think it’s a lot of mistake people make when they think about how these bankers are working. We think that they’re actually interested in the markets. We think that they’re—no. What they’re after are very large pools of cash for themselves. They’re after accumulating huge pools of money that they can do with whatever they like on a day-to-day basis. Right? And so, Goldman, in 1991, came up with this idea of the commodity index fund, which really was a way for them to accumulate huge piles of cash for themselves. It wasn’t really about the markets, anyway. The market was just an excuse. And so, the fact that they threw these wheat markets out of whack didn’t really matter to them.

How did this work? Instead of a buy-and-sell order, like everybody does in these markets, they just started buying. It’s called "going long." They started going long on wheat futures. OK? And every time one of these contracts came due, they would do something called "rolling it over" into the next contract. So they would take all those buy promises they had made and say, "OK, we still—we’re just going to—we’ll buy more later. And plus we’re going to buy more now." And they kept on buying and buying and buying and buying and accumulating this unprecedented, this historically unprecedented pile of long-only wheat futures. And this accumulation created a very odd phenomenon in the market. It’s called a "demand shock." Usually prices go up because supply is low, right? That’s the idea. There’s not a lot of supply, so the price goes up. In this case, Goldman and the other banks had introduced this completely unnatural and artificial demand to buy wheat, and that then set the price up. Now, a lot of people are saying, "Oh, it was biofuel production. It was drought in Australia. It was floods in Kazakhstan." Let me tell you, hard red wheat generally trades between $3 and $6 per sixty-pound bushel. It went up to $12, then $15, then $18. Then it broke $20. And on February 25th, 2008, hard red spring futures settled at $25 per bushel. This is completely beyond the pale, particularly at a—

JUAN GONZALEZ: Almost ten times its historic price.

FREDERICK KAUFMAN: Yeah. It was just completely out of control. And, of course, the irony here is that in 2008, it was the greatest wheat-producing year in world history. The world produced more wheat in 2008 than ever before.​