Droughts in central Canada and the US have reduced expected availability of feed grains and prices are starting to rise.

Dr Christensen said: "One of the programs that the Feeds Innovation Institute instituted and ran for a couple of years was called the Western Canadian Feeds Innovation Network or WCFIN and what we were trying to do with that program, it was really an extension and knowledge sharing type program. Even though the program is finished we still have a web site that's active and one of the tools that we created for that web site was a feed pricing page.

"If you go to WCFIN.ca feed pricing what you'll see is a conglomerate of all of the different sources of publicly available websites that give prices for feed grains in western Canada.

"We have a number of web sites from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba all on the same page so if producers are interested in trying to figure out what are the prices for say cereals at a number of different sites they can use our web site to go out and search and try to understand what public knowledge is there and then they can use that to compare to the brokers or the private companies that they're working with."

Dr Christensen says, in addition to price, livestock producers will need to keep a close watch on quality and she encourages producers to check samples closely for any pathogens or mycotoxins that might be present in the grain.