UK dairy and beef farms pooling their annual compound feed and mineral spend. IQ aggregates volume, runs the competitive process, and delivers a price you could never negotiate alone. Your existing supplier can compete — or you can switch. Your call.
A 400-cow dairy operation consuming 1,200 tonnes of compound feed annually at £340/tonne is spending £408,000 a year on feed alone. That is typically the single largest controllable cost on the farm. Yet most dairy farmers have never put that spend out to competitive tender — they buy from the supplier they have always used, at the price that supplier quotes, adjusted upward each season with a justification that sounds reasonable at the time.
The IQ Benchmark consistently shows that dairy farms buying through competitive collective processes achieve prices 15–22% below the market rate paid by farms buying individually from a single supplier. On a £408,000 annual feed bill, 18% is £73,440 — every year. That is not a marginal saving. It is a business-changing one.
This pool covers all compound feed and mineral supplement requirements for dairy and beef operations — dairy cow compounds (high and low energy), beef finisher and grower rations, dry cow minerals, transition compounds, and calf starters. Each farm's specific nutritional specification is incorporated into the tender — you are not buying a generic product, you are buying to your ration.
IQ's agricultural procurement team reviews all nutritional specifications before they go to market to ensure like-for-like comparison. Feed companies compete on price for an equivalent nutritional specification — not on formulation manipulation that makes cheap feed look comparable to quality feed.