{"data":{"id":"sw_f5727ed032889c2c3046","slug":"soybean-meal-futures-slide-7-in-a-month-still-up-nearly-17-for-the-year","title":"Soybean Meal Futures Slide 7% in a Month, Still Up Nearly 17% for the Year","subheadline":"CBOT soybean meal prices have pulled back sharply over the past month even as the contract remains well above where it started 2025, highlighting a split between short-term relief and longer-term feed-cost pressure.","summary":"Soybean meal futures have dropped roughly 7% over the past month and 2.5% over the past week, even as the contract remains up nearly 17% year to date, a divergence drawing attention to shifting livestock feed-cost dynamics.","body":"Soybean meal futures traded at $342.05 per short ton as of Oct. 27, a delayed continuous-contract reading on the CME Group's CBOT exchange, according to data from Financial Modeling Prep. That price sits roughly 7.3% below where the contract traded a month earlier and about 2.5% lower than a week ago, even though soybean meal remains approximately 16.9% higher year to date and 14.1% higher than a year ago.\n\nThe pattern amounts to a short-term pullback layered on top of a longer-term rally. A contract can be down sharply over four weeks while still showing a double-digit gain for the year if the bulk of that annual advance happened earlier in 2025, before the recent pullback erased some of the gain. That is effectively what the numbers show for soybean meal right now: a market that rallied hard for much of the year and has since given back a meaningful chunk of those gains in a compressed window.\n\nThis divergence between the weekly, monthly and year-to-date figures first stood out in data tracked on AlternativeMarkets.AI, a Madison Labs research site, which logs soybean meal's performance across multiple timeframes alongside related agricultural contracts.\n\nFor investors and commodity-market participants, the split matters because soybean meal is not a speculative instrument in isolation. It is a core input cost for poultry, hog and aquaculture operations across the United States, Brazil and Argentina, the three dominant producers and exporters of soybeans and their processed derivatives. Prices move closely with soybean crush margins, the spread between the cost of raw soybeans and the combined value of the meal and oil extracted from them, as well as with global livestock feed demand. Argentina's processing capacity in particular carries outsized influence over the global meal trade, since the country is a major exporter of crushed soybean products rather than raw beans.\n\nA month-over-month decline of the magnitude seen in soybean meal can translate into near-term relief for feed buyers locking in costs for upcoming production cycles, even as the year-to-date gain signals that overall feed expenses remain elevated relative to where they stood entering 2025. Livestock producers managing margins over a full production cycle, rather than a single month, are likely to weigh both figures rather than either one in isolation.\n\nThe move in soybean meal has occurred against a broader commodities backdrop where energy markets have also been volatile. Oil prices have seesawed amid renewed diplomatic efforts tied to the Mideast conflict, and India's oil minister on Tuesday pushed back on reports of U.S. pressure over Russian crude purchases, according to Reuters reporting carried by OilPrice.com. While energy and agricultural commodities trade on largely separate fundamentals, both reflect a market environment in which price swings across raw-input costs have been more pronounced than usual in recent weeks.\n\nWithin the CBOT agricultural complex tracked alongside soybean meal, soybeans themselves were recently quoted near 1,257.5, cotton near 454.40 and coffee near 657.75, with coffee down modestly on the day. These related markets provide context for how the broader crop and feed-cost complex has been trading, though each contract is driven by its own distinct supply and demand factors.\n\nLooking ahead, market participants tracking soybean meal are likely to watch upcoming U.S. Department of Agriculture crop and export data, along with harvest progress in Argentina and Brazil, both of which influence global meal supply and, by extension, crush margins. Movements in the broader soybean complex, including the price of raw soybeans and soybean oil, will also factor into where meal prices head next, since crush economics link all three markets. No forecasts for where soybean meal prices will trade next are attributed to any named analyst in the available data, and any near-term price path remains a matter for the market to determine rather than a certainty implied by recent performance alone. For now, the clearest fact in the record is the gap itself: a contract down nearly 7% on the month, down roughly 2.5% on the week, yet still up close to 17% for the year, a reminder that short-term and long-term trends in feed-cost markets do not always move in the same direction at the same time.","source":{"name":"AlternativeMarkets.AI","slug":"alternativemarkets-ai"},"category":"Commodities","article_type":"Data Story","license":"Free to republish, in full or in part, with attribution to Capital Data Wire and a link to the original article. No fees, registration, or permission required.","quality_score":85,"human_reviewed":false,"original_url":"https://alternativemarkets.ai/commodity/ZMUSD","featured_image":null,"published_at":"2026-10-27T11:33:15.031115+00:00","updated_at":"2026-10-27T11:33:15.031115+00:00","is_demo":false,"attribution":"Via Capital Data Wire. Discovered via AlternativeMarkets.AI.","attribution_html":"Via Capital Data Wire. Discovered via AlternativeMarkets.AI."},"meta":{"demo_data":false}}