Read the Label
Have you checked the ingredients on your animals’ feed? You might be surprised what’s in there.
You’ve no doubt noticed that grain prices have increased cost for livestock feed. This, in turn, may have you searching for the cheapest feed out there. But what seems good for your pocketbook may not be so good for your animals. And, in the long run, it isn’t good for your pocketbook, either.
Livestock feed producers, and this includes many popular national brands, make their profit by creating a product as cheaply as possible. To boost profit, they stretch that high-cost grain by adding fillers, which are less-expensive ingredients that bulk up the weight of the feed but provide no nutritional benefits to your animal.
Straw, rice mill, soybean stubble, cottonseed hulls, corncobs, peanut hulls and citrus pulp are among products often added as inexpensive fillers to livestock feed. “Cereal by-products,” is another frequently used filler, but what that consists of is anyone’s guess — Oat hulls? Wheat middlings? — because it might vary in the factory from day to day, depending on what’s available. And because cereal by-products could consist of any number of ingredients that are not listed individually on the packaging, you’re really not sure what you’re feeding your animals.
That also means that when you pay for a 50-pound bag of feed, you’re also paying for ingredients that have little to no nutritional value for your animal. For example, corn stalks, peanut hulls, soybean stubble, wheat straw and cottonseed hulls are among fillers with the least-digestible nutrients. Because fillers create the need for animals to eat more to get the right amount of nutrition, you end up buying more of those 50-pound bags.
And that’s not good for either your animals or your pocketbook.
Stretching Dollars
