What 900g average daily gain actually means for a household
Feed specifications are written for buyers, not for the person doing the feeding. Here is the same number translated into weeks, taka and risk.
DigiGram Ventures · 30 Jun 2026 · 5 min read
"DLS-compliant compound feed, validated at 900g ADG" is a sentence written for a procurement officer. For the household actually filling the trough twice a day, it needs translating.
What the number is
Average daily gain is how much weight an animal puts on per day across the cycle. At 900g a day, an animal gains roughly 6.3kg a week, or about 27kg a month. Over a 12-month fattening cycle that is the difference between an animal you can sell and an animal you are still feeding.
Why ungraded feed costs more than it saves
67% of the farmers we surveyed buy ungraded feed from a single nearby market. Ungraded means the protein and energy content is whatever the batch happened to contain. The animal still eats the same volume; it simply converts less of it. The saving on the sack is paid back with interest in extra weeks of feeding.
Three things that hold the number down
- Interruption. A week without feed does not cost a week of growth — the animal loses condition and takes longer than that to recover it.
- Water. Intake collapses without clean water available all day, and so does conversion.
- Untreated parasites. Deworming on schedule is the cheapest weight you will ever buy.
What we do about it
Shadhin Cattle Feed is produced to DLS specification at 100 tons a month, scalable to 500, and distributed through the cooperative network so a delivery does not depend on a farmer travelling to a market. Growth is checked weekly against the project SOP, and the record of that feeding is not just husbandry — it becomes production evidence on the household's enterprise profile, which is what a lender reads later.
