I haven't commented here in years. Recently jumped back on with the thought or reaching out to the community asking how they calculated cost of gain and run breakevens for feeder cattle. That was months ago & I've been lurking ever since. I'm a consulting nutritionist and what I see working with smaller feedlots (under 5,000 head) is poor grasp of cost of gain and where profitabilit breaks. I'm in the very early stages of attempting to build an app that calculates cost of gain & break even prices for the user after they input purchase price & purchase weight, sale price & sale weight, adg, death loss, vet/med cost, hedge costs, in shrink%, & yardage/ day, interest rate, cash equity, NEm % increasement (typically 0, but could be say 15% or more with a hard winter or mud). The user would also input their rations & feed costs and days on each ration. The app then uses NEg to estimate the as fed intake needed to gain the user suggested ADG for cattle. User can move intake however they see fit. The user inputted intake number and ADG plus all other costs then generate cost of gain & the breakeven purchase price (price you can pay and make $0) and the breakeven sale price (price you need to sell at to make $0). It would also generate its on projection for performance based on NEg & what you say intake is (financial project is based on user inputted ADG, this ADG would be based on Neg & user inputted intake). Would also project the pounds of ever feedstuff used.
Sorry for a 200 plus word tangent. I've been working on it for nearly a year when I have time. The combination of cattle and numbers turn me into a cowboy nerd. 900 plus pound steers killing today are reporting about $1.05 COG at commercial yards with about 140 days on feed. Same category but heifers are closing out at about $1.20. Those would be averages of large commercial yards. To calculate a specific cost of gain projection you would need to give numbers for all the variables i talked about in my 200 word tangent. If you want me to run one I'll run it through the prototype & tell you all what it spits out.