Making Least Cost Stock Feeds

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30442, 16 May 1964, Page 8

Making Least Cost Stock Feeds

COMPUTERS and mathematicians have a vital role in the preparation of minimum cost stock feed _ mixtures. Dr. J. D. Stewart, acting head of the farm management department at Lincoln College, told the poultryfarmers’ refresher course at the college this week that large-scale feed firms in Britain employed full-time mathematicians, whose job was the formulation of feed mixtures with the idea of making small savings which spread over a large output would amount to substantial savings. Dr. Stewart said that the college had been working with a local feed firm in attempting to apply this type of approach, known as mathematical programming of least cost feed mixes, to their problems. With data for unit costs of potential ingredients of a mixture, the analysis of these ingredients and the limitations or constraints, that It was wished to apply to the proposed mixture, fed into a computer, Dr. Stewart said, the results provided by the machine would show the ingredients required for a

given weight of the mixture, the total cost, the range in costs of the included ingredients for which the solution would remain the same, and the reduction in costs of excluded ingredients which would be necessary before they would come into the solution. He said that these calculations could be done on a desk calculator, but if there were a great number of details in the analysis of ingredients and a large number of limitations or constraints, what might take two or three days with the calculator would only take about 20 minutes with the computer that was used in Canterbury.