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scmn | One thing about grinding feed is how you determine your cost per ton. Factor the grinder over enough tons of feed, underestimate your cost of fuel per ton, free labor for grinding, free repair labor, exclude tractor depreciation, support overhead, etc., etc and you can get the cost of grinding pretty low. What I struggle with is putting hundreds of hours per year on a tractor that consumes hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel to accomplish a task that is performed for cents on the dollar with an electric motor. One guy I know switched from PTO grain auger to 60hp electric on a master mover for unloading semis during harvest and saved enough money the first year to make a new tractor payment and went from trading every 3 years to every 10 yrs from the hours savings. I have yet to see a new feed mill built that is powered by a diesel motor because the cost per ton is far cheaper from an electric mill than a PTO powered mill. For me the biggest benefit of grinding your own feed is getting feed at 7pm on a Friday of a holiday weekend and not having to wait until 8am Tuesday.
You are talking about 17 tons per year (6+3.5+5*1.5). FWIW there are a lot of hog producers that are consuming that many tons per day and having their feed ground by the local mill. Can you save money owning a grinder for 17T per year, maybe but I would bet there are a lot better uses of your time that will return far better than grinding feed. Another thought is if it was cheaper to grind with a mixer grinder than an electric mill then the big hog outfit out of Sleepy Eye would be having the integrator grind the feed vs grinding it all at their mill and trucking the feed hundreds of miles to the integrator's barn.
If you are purely looking at the $235/ton for feed vs the $131/ton for ear corn, make sure you add in the cost of your soy hulls, cottonseed, mineral, etc to get your true cost of feed. I have two rations that are both 14% that have over $100/ton difference in cost from the local mill due to the difference in the ration. One 14% ration is fed to steers and the other to dairy replacement heifers. They are being fed differently based on their use (feeders vs replacements) and that greatly affects the ingredients in the ration. The mill charges the same $10/ton for grind/mix/deliver on both ratios, the difference is the cost of the ingredients. FWIW 131/ton on ear corn seems high (4.60/bushel corn). | |
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When to get a feed grinder?
