Estimating value of nutrients based on market prices of feedstuffs

In many instances, nutritionists, feed manufacturers, and dairy producers need an estimate of what a feed is worth on a nutritional basis to facilitate the formulation of balanced diets and the purchase of appropriate, price competitive feedstuffs. Up until now, all methods used shared common flaws. We derived a maximum likelihood method that uses composition and prices of all feedstuffs traded in a given market to estimate unit costs of nutrients and break-even prices of feedstuffs, The method was programmed as a Windows 95/98 application named SESAME.