Feed wastage: the money on your litter
Feed is two-thirds of your cost. A few percent spilled, sorted, spoiled or stolen is a larger loss than most of the things farms spend their time worrying about.
Work it out once and it changes how you walk through a shed. If feed is roughly two-thirds of the cost of production, then losing 5% of your feed costs you about 3% of your total cost of production — on a margin that is often thinner than that.
None of it shows up in your FCRFeed conversion ratio — kilograms of feed to put on a kilogram of live weight. The single most useful number in broiler production, because feed is 60–75% of what the bird cost.Glossary → as waste. It shows up as a worse FCR, and gets blamed on the feed.
Where it actually goes
Spillage from feeders. The largest and most fixable source. Overfilled pans and tubes let birds bill feed onto the litter as they eat.
Wrong feeder height. A feeder below the bird’s back line gets scratched into the litter. The rule is simple: the lip of the pan sits level with the bird’s back, adjusted as the flock grows — which means weekly, not once.
Too few feeding points. Competition at the pan causes rushing and scratching, and the birds at the back lose out entirely, which shows up as poor uniformity.
Sorting in mash. Birds pick the grain and leave the fines. The fines are where the premix, the amino acids and the coccidiostat are — so sorting wastes the most valuable fraction and leaves you with an under-medicated flock.
Storage losses. Spoilage, moisture, rodents and wild birds. Rodents in a Pakistani feed store take a real tonnage and bring Salmonella with them.
Spoiled feed in the shed. Feed sitting wet under a leaking drinker moulds, and mouldy feed is a mycotoxin route as well as a loss.
Pellet fines. A bag that arrives as half fines is a quality problem you paid pellet prices for. Check it.
What to actually do
- Fill feeders less. Roughly a third to half full is the standard guidance. Birds waste feed in proportion to how easy it is to throw out.
- Adjust height weekly. Written on the wall chart, done on the same day.
- Walk the shed and look at the litter. Visible feed on the floor is a measurement, not a nuisance. If you can see it, it is significant.
- Fix wet patches immediately — under drinkers especially.
- Store feed off the floor, off the wall, covered, rodent-proofed, and used first-in-first-out.
- Reconcile bags. Count what arrives and what is used. Persistent gaps between delivery note and shed usage are worth investigating calmly and properly.
- Weigh a sample bag occasionally. Short weight is a real and documented problem, and it is invisible unless you check.
The reconciliation nobody does
At the end of a cycle: bags delivered, bags used, live weight produced. That gives you feed per kilogram, which is the number that actually matters, and it will usually be worse than the FCR you calculated from feeder records.
The difference between the two is your wastage. It is the only way to measure it, and once you have measured it for two cycles you will know whether it is worth chasing.
FCR calculator → Feed requirement calculator →
Why this is worth more attention than the rate
Farmers spend a great deal of energy on the Rate · priceریٹrateBorrowed and universal — ‘aaj ka rate kya hai?’Glossary →, which they do not control, and very little on wastage, which they do. A few percent of feed recovered every cycle is a permanent improvement to the break-even price you can survive.