| MiradaAcres - 5/29/2020 13:26 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).
I won't say that your story on the 60 hp electric motor isn't possible but you'd have to put a huge pile of grain through that machine for it to save enough $'s on electric vs diesel to make a payment on a new tractor.
The electric to run a 60 hp motor (at full load) is going to be in the neighborhood of $5-6/hour. The cost of diesel to run a 100 hp tractor (at full load) would be in the range of $12-14/hour. Takes a lot of hours of saving $7-$8/hour on fuel cost to make a new tractor payment on a tractor of any size at all.
For the OP it probably doesn't make sense to grind his own feed, there just isn't enough tons to spread the costs over.
As for the hog guys, most independent producers that I know that are in the hog game long term own their own feed mill of some sort. A grinder/mixer can be very competitive on cost. It just depends on how efficient and productive you can make it.
We burn 1/2 of a gallon of diesel per ton for grind/mix and delivery. 12 gallons does 24 ton of feed and the corn never leaves the yard so there is no trucking cost to get the corn to town.
Now think about how far you can haul a semi load of feed from Sleepy Eye on 12 gallons of fuel. Say the truck gets 8 mpg (?, I don't really know what to expect on a feed truck), it can travel 96 miles round trip on 12 gallons. So you can only haul feed 48 miles from Sleepy Eye before the truck is burning more fuel than I use to grind feed and that doesn't account for the fuel to haul the corn to the mill either.
In all honesty, grinding feed is one of the most profitable things I do vs the cost of hiring it done and trucking our corn to town.
It might even be more profitable than the sprayer.
The reason Christensens and other integrators don't have farmers making feed is it would open them up to a huge liability and also be a nightmare to manage.
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When to get a feed grinder?
