What Actually Sets the Price of Your Feed Sack

There is a version of feed advice that goes: watch the Chicago board, watch world grain, buy when it dips. It gets repeated in every hog-raising group in this country, usually by somebody who has never bought a sack in their life.

Half of it is right. The other half will waste your attention for years.

This site publishes BAI's weekly wholesale price for eight feed ingredients back to January 2023, the World Bank's monthly reference prices for maize and soybean meal back to 1960, and the BSP's monthly peso-dollar average back to 1945. Put those against each other and the transmission is not one story. It is two, and they behave completely differently.

What we are actually comparing

Four numbers, all published free, all in this archive with the date somebody opened the source on every row.

To compare them you have to put the world price into the currency and the unit a Philippine buyer thinks in. Multiply the dollar-per-tonne figure by that month's BSP average and divide by a thousand. That gives pesos per kilo, which is what BAI prints.

Soybean meal: it transmits, and it transmits fast

Take BAI's local SBM (US) price, average the weeks into months, and set it against the World Bank soybean meal price converted at the BSP rate. Forty-one months of overlap.

The correlation on levels is 0.91. On month-on-month percentage changes, which is the harder test because it strips out the shared trend, it is 0.60 at zero lag, falls to 0.27 at one month, and is gone by two.

In plain terms: when the world soybean meal price moves, your local price has already moved in the same month. There is no lag to trade against. By the time you read about it, your dealer has repriced.

The level relationship is remarkably tidy too. Local SBM has sat at roughly 1.09 to 1.26 times the peso-converted world price for three and a half years. That multiple is the shipping, the port, the trader and the margin, and it is stable enough that you can forecast your own SBM price to within a peso or two by doing the multiplication yourself.

Notice the last row. The ratio compressed. Between July 2025 and July 2026 the peso-converted world price rose 28.9% and BAI's local figure rose only 12.0%, which means the importers and traders absorbed part of it rather than passing the whole thing through. Honestly, that is more restraint than anybody expected and it will not last.

Yellow corn: it does not transmit at all

Now the same test on corn, and this is the part that surprised me enough that I ran it three different ways to make sure I had not broken something.

On levels, local yellow corn against peso-converted world maize gives 0.50, which sounds like a relationship and is mostly two lines drifting upward for unrelated reasons. On month-on-month changes it gives -0.01 at zero lag, 0.04 at one month, 0.17 at two, 0.14 at three, 0.22 at four, and nothing at five or six. That is noise. There is no month, in three and a half years of data, at which a move in the world maize price shows up in what a Philippine feed buyer pays for corn.

The premium wanders accordingly:

Between 1.4 and 2.1 times the world price, moving on its own schedule.

The reason is not mysterious. The Philippines grows most of its own yellow corn and protects it. What sets your corn price is the Mindanao harvest, the state of the roads out of Bukidnon, inter-island shipping, drying capacity and aflatoxin losses in a wet October, not what happened at a US export terminal. PIDS said the quiet part out loud in its 2022 benchmarking study: importing corn from Thailand can be cheaper than trucking corn from the southern Philippines to Luzon.

Soybean meal is imported. Corn is domestic. That single fact explains both halves of this article.

What the peso did

Between July 2025 and July 2026, the world soybean meal price went from 335 to 398 US dollars a tonne, up 18.8%. Over the same twelve months the BSP monthly average went from ₱56.75 to ₱61.60 to the dollar, 8.5% more pesos for the same dollar.

Compounded, the peso price of the same commodity rose 28.9%.

Roughly a third of what happened to your imported protein cost in that year was not the commodity at all. It was the currency. No tariff decision, no DA circular and no import ban touches that. It is the single largest thing acting on a Philippine hog farm's cost base that nobody in the industry ever campaigns about, because there is nobody to campaign at.

Repricing our own grower ration

Abstract correlations do not buy feed. So here is the concrete version.

We publish a worked grower ration: 55 kg yellow corn, 14 kg rice bran, 15 kg copra meal, 10 kg soybean meal, 3 kg fishmeal, plus premix, lysine, limestone and salt, making a 100 kg batch at about 15.8% crude protein.

Four of those ingredients are priced weekly by BAI. Hold the recipe fixed and reprice just those four, at their published national wholesale figures, week by week:

Twelve months, same recipe, and the ingredient bill went up 21% from ₱17.96 to ₱21.75. On a 100 kg batch that is ₱379 more. Over the 240 to 260 kg of grower and finisher feed one pig eats, it is roughly ₱950 a head, which on a herd of ten is a month of somebody's wages.

Two honesty notes on that table. BAI prices rice bran D1 and our ration specifies the cheaper D2 grade, so the column above is dearer than the mix you would actually buy. And the 3 kg of fishmeal is left out entirely, because BAI stopped printing a local fishmeal figure after 18 May 2026 and we do not carry a number the source did not publish.

Which ingredient actually moved

The headline hides the interesting part. Year on year, monthly means, July 2025 against July 2026:

Read that top to bottom and the pattern is unpleasant. The cheap energy extenders got expensive fastest. Pollard, the classic way a smallholder stretches a corn-heavy ration, nearly doubled. DDGS and rice bran both outran corn. The protein source everybody worries about, soybean meal, was the second-smallest mover on the list.

Which means the standard advice, cut back on the soybean meal to save money, was pointed at the wrong ingredient for the whole of the past year.

What to do with this

Buy imported protein ahead when the peso is sliding, not when the world price dips. The world price is already in your dealer's number by the time you see it. The exchange rate move is visible in advance and takes weeks to work through the shipment cycle. If BSP's monthly average has moved a peso against you and you have the cash and the storage, that is your window.

Do not buy corn on a world-price signal. Buy it on a harvest signal. If you are within trucking distance of Bukidnon, Isabela or Cagayan, the October to December window is your price, and it has nothing to do with anything happening abroad.

Look hard at copra meal if you are in Visayas or Mindanao. It is the only ingredient in BAI's table that is cheaper than a year ago, and it is 59% of yellow corn's price. It will not carry a grower ration on its own. It runs about 21% crude protein and it is short on lysine, so it stretches a mix rather than replacing the soybean meal in it. Hold it near 15% of the ration so the fibre does not depress intake. The cheapest way to feed pigs has the full substitution table.

Know what a kilo of gain costs you before you switch anything. A cheaper sack that costs you FCR is not cheaper. That is the whole trap with high-fibre local mixes and it is why the calculator exists.

Remember what this is a share of. PIDS costed a 1,408-head commercial fattening operation and found feed at 57.4% of operating cost, against 36.9% for a 40-head backyard operation whose figure is held down by imputed land rent rather than by cheap feed. Either way it is the biggest line on the sheet, and a 21% move in it is not something you absorb with better husbandry.

And it is only one side of the squeeze. This is the cost you pay. What you are paid, and where the rest of the retail peso goes, is the other half, and it moved against raisers over the same twelve months. Why that price has a lid on it is the third piece, and who is left standing after all of it is the fourth.

Ang mais dinhi ra sa atoa gikan, ang soybean meal gikan sa gawas. Lahi ang ilang lihok, ug mao nay hinungdan.

Where this argument runs out of data

Two places, and they are worth saying plainly.

There is no published series for what a sack of finished feed costs. Our feed price series holds one dated observation, ₱36.69/kg as the mean of premium grower and finisher retailer listings on 12 July 2026, and one row is not a trend. Every ingredient number above is wholesale, at a market level a backyard raiser buying two bags at a time never sees. Nobody in this country publishes a national finished-feed price and we log that as an open gap rather than filling it with a guess.

BAI's own coverage is thinning. It stopped printing the Argentine soybean meal price in October 2025 and the local fishmeal price after May 2026. Both are recorded as dated nulls carrying the report id that printed them, so the week the source went quiet is itself citable, and neither has been interpolated. The gaps page lists every one of these with the reason.

The habit

Once a month, write down three numbers: the BSP peso-dollar average, BAI's yellow corn price and BAI's SBM price. All three are free, all three take five minutes.

After six months you will know two things nobody can tell you from an article. You will know what your own dealer's markup over BAI's national wholesale figure actually is, which is your negotiating position. And you will know whether your corn is behaving like Bukidnon's corn or like somebody's import quota, which is the difference between planning around a harvest and planning around a policy.

Then go and see what all of it does to your margin. The profit simulator takes a feed price and a farmgate price and tells you the truth about the gap between them, and our ten-pig worked example shows how thin that gap currently is.