Pheonix Research - Editorial Index
Editorial analysis anchored to industries, segments, and the market intelligence behind them.
Brazil's feed market added three million tonnes in 2026. Broiler rations took 1.25 million of it and got the headlines. But the fastest-growing species in 2025 was dairy cattle — 0.56 million tonnes against beef's 0.54 — and that lead more than halves in 2026. Two segments of almost identical size, running on completely different clocks.
CADE cleared BRF into Marfrig on 5 September 2025 because horizontal overlaps were below 20% and every vertical-stage share below 30%. Those thresholds measure the fragmentation of milling, not the meat industry — which is why MBRF is better understood as a consolidated feed order book than as a consolidated feed producer. Bunge–Viterra closed five weeks earlier, and the merchant mill now sits between a more concentrated supplier and a more concentrated customer.
Feed is 62.51% of a Paraná broiler producer's cost and 72.52% of a Santa Catarina pig producer's, per Embrapa CIAS. A mill can pass that cost through. It cannot pass a margin through it — and that single asymmetry explains why the industry's profit moved into additives, why capital is being spent from both ends at once, and why cheap grain is a demand subsidy with an expiry date.
Latin America made 204.4 million tonnes of compound feed in 2025. Brazil is 89.9 million tonnes of that and Mexico is 41.9 — but one buys corn from a record harvest in its own currency and the other imports 26.8 million tonnes of it in dollars. Four countries, four different cost structures, and no such thing as a regional average.
Dicalcium phosphate costs more in sulfur and acid than in rock, and exports are sorted by a quota rather than a price. Why the feed phosphate market is misread by everyone watching phosphate rock.
Feed tonnage grew 1.2% in 2024 to 1.396 billion tonnes. The molecules inside it did not: lysine trades at or below the cost of production even with EU anti-dumping duties of up to 58.2% on Chinese supply. The margin has migrated to whichever additive a regulator, rather than a formulator, decides to require.
