Livestock Feed Rations: Dry Matter, Pearson Square, Least-Cost Mixes & Feed Budgets

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Convert six feeds from as-fed prices to the dry-matter basis, price their protein and energy, and let a formula name the cheapest energy source: the comparison every ration starts from.
• Estimate the daily dry matter intake of four cattle groups from liveweight, add it up for the herd and turn it into kilograms and tonnes of ration as fed for the feeder wagon.
• Turn a finisher ration from kilograms as fed into dry matter, energy and protein, compare it with the requirement and find the protein gap.
• Mix barley and rapeseed meal to an exact protein target with the Pearson square, scale it to a batch, convert it to kilograms as fed and price a tonne of the mix.
• Cost three candidate pig diets, check each against a protein, lysine and energy specification and find out how much the cheapest compliant diet saves in a year.
• Add up the calcium and phosphorus of a cereal-heavy ration, fix its Ca:P ratio with feed limestone and cost the mineral premix for a group over the finishing period.
• Budget six winter months of silage, take the clamp losses off the measured stock and decide how much silage to buy in with a safety reserve.
• Evaluate a two-ration finishing trial pen by pen: daily gain, feed conversion, feed cost per kg of gain and margin over feed, and chart the cost per kg of gain.