Bos Nutrition Services publishes weekly value-of-gain tables for feeder cattle in 23 states, built directly from USDA Market News weekly auction summaries. New numbers every week. Free to use on any phone or computer.
Open the VoG toolNo sign-up. Works in your browser, and installs to your home screen like an app.
Value of gain by state, from the last four weeks of USDA weekly auction summaries. Click a state to open its tool.
Five views of your state’s feeder cattle market, each built to answer a question producers and consultants actually ask.
Fitted steer and heifer price curves and cumulative value-of-gain tables from 400, 500, and 600 lb bases, refreshed each week when the USDA state summary posts.
Enter a purchase weight and a target sale weight and see what each added pound is worth at current prices in your state.
Forward value-of-gain projections built on CME Feeder Cattle futures and your state’s basis, with average daily gain you can adjust to match your cattle.
How your state’s feeder prices and value of gain have moved week to week, so this week’s number has context.
The parsed sale data behind every chart, with a link to the source report so you can check the numbers yourself.
Free, no sign-up, and it works on your phone at the sale barn.
Open the VoG tool
The Feed value page puts a market price on energy, protein and fiber, then shows which feeds are priced below or above what their nutrients are worth. It uses this week’s published FOB prices for your state and its neighbors, from the Missouri By-Product Feed Price Listing and USDA Market News. You choose which nutrients to price, and every feed is also valued on its energy alone.
The market’s price for a Mcal of net energy and a pound of protein right now, estimated from every feed traded in your region at once, with the uncertainty shown.
A breakeven price for every feed with a range around it, so you can see at a glance which by-products are cheap for what they deliver and which aren’t.
Pick a feed, adjust its dry matter, and see what it is worth against today’s market before you buy.
No sign-up. Prices refresh daily. Sellers can post their own FOB prices to the listing.
Open Feed valueBos Nutrition Services clients see the same analysis delivered to their yard: freight from each seller included, their own bids and trucking quotes, and the ingredients they’re feeding now. Client login
Each week the tool reads the USDA Market News Weekly Cattle Auction Summary for the chosen state (Medium & Large 1 steers and heifers; Medium & Large 1-2 where a state grades few cattle as 1). For Missouri this is the same report the Missouri Department of Agriculture publishes in its Weekly Market Summary. Prices across the reported weight range are fitted with AICc-weighted polynomial models — an averaging approach that stays stable even when several candidate models fit the data nearly equally well.
Value of gain is the change in an animal's total value divided by the pounds added: what the market is paying, per hundredweight of gain, to move cattle from one weight to the next. It is the number to set against your cost of gain when deciding whether to sell now or put on more pounds. Values outside the published weight range are extended along a straight line and clearly flagged as extrapolated.
The forecast view adds CME Group Feeder Cattle futures, computing basis as the fitted state cash price minus the nearest-to-expiration contract, so forward projections reflect both the futures board and the local market.
Every figure on this site is a statistical estimate rather than a single reported sale: price curves are fitted with information-theoretic model averaging, the national map weights each weight class by the number of head sold and pools four weeks of reports, and the confidence in each state's number is measured by resampling — so a state is shown only when enough cattle stood behind the estimate.
All values are model-based estimates for informational and educational purposes — not price guarantees or marketing advice.
Value of gain (VoG) is the extra revenue a heavier animal brings divided by the extra weight it took to get there, usually expressed in dollars per hundredweight of gain. Because lighter cattle sell for more per pound than heavier cattle, VoG is always different from the sale price itself — and comparing it to your cost of gain tells you whether added pounds pay.
Cash prices come from USDA Market News weekly cattle auction summaries for each state, posted on Mondays or Fridays depending on the state. Futures quotes come from CME Group, with an automatic fallback source when quotes are delayed. Every weekly report in the tool links to the underlying USDA report.
Nothing. The tool is free, runs in any modern browser, and can be installed to your phone's home screen so it opens like an app.
The current report, calculator, and forecast are one click away.
Open the VoG tool