Darak and Copra Meal: What They Do to a Sack You Already Bought

Three tables, and the one column they share

Three Philippine tables hold the numbers this question needs, and where each one’s columns stop is the answer.

Each of the three prints PHILSAN, 2010 in its own heading. PNS/BAFS 382:2024 Annex A, printed p. 15, is the sack: “Nutrient standards per species (DA-BAI, 2008; PHILSAN, 2010)”, six columns wide. PNS/BAFS 370:2023 Annex B, printed p. 19, is the ingredient: “Common and locally available feed ingredients (PHILSAN, 2010)”, eight columns wide. Annex D of that standard, printed p. 23, is the bird. All three are headed (Informative).

Read down the columns and the pairings are odd. The bird’s table and the sack’s table share calcium and phosphorus. The ingredient’s table and the sack’s table share fibre. The ingredient’s table and the bird’s table share energy. All four meet on crude protein and stop there, which is why the arithmetic below runs on protein first and has to change documents to reach energy at all.

PNS/BAFS 382:2024 does one more thing with its annex. § 10.3 says “Any organic feed for livestock and poultry that do not meet the levels specified in Annex A (Nutrient standard per species) is considered supplemental feed and shall be labeled as such”, and §§ 5.2.7 and 10.2 both say shall about the same table. So does § 6.2.3.1(b), which routes a licensed chemist’s release testing to it before a product goes out for distribution and sale. Four shall clauses pointing at an annex the standard itself marks (Informative). A Philippine document therefore has a name for a feed that has fallen off its row: supplemental feed. It applies to organic feed. For the sack carried home from an ordinary agrivet, that consequence sits in no document at all, and the feeds pillar works through what an ordinary commercial label is required to print.

Ano ang nangyayari sa sako kapag nilagyan mo ng darak?

One sum runs under every threshold on this page. A dilution is a weighted mean: add a fraction x of an ingredient and each nutrient in the finished mix lands at sack × (1 − x) + ingredient × x.

Darak breaks the sack through the protein column. A broiler starter declaring 19.50% crude protein, cut with Rice Bran D1, reaches the broiler finisher’s 18.00% row at 17.65% of the finished weight if D1 is read at the crude protein minimum of 11.0% that PNS/BAFS 163:2015 § 5.4.13 sets for D1 or Cono, and at 20.38% if it is read at the 12.14% typical composition in Annex B. Two figures, from two documents, answering two questions. 163’s number is a floor a sack of darak has to clear to be sold as D1 at all. Annex B’s is what an average sack of it holds. A keeper who reads the pair as a disagreement has misread them.

Bigat po ang idinadagdag ng darak sa sako. Tumataas ang kilo, kaya mukhang mas marami ang nabili mo. Sa protina lang lumalabas ang totoo.

Its crude fibre barely moves, and fibre is what everyone expects darak to do. Against the broiler finisher’s 5.50% NMT fibre ceiling, D1 at the 7.0% maximum 163 § 5.4.13 allows would take about 40% of the mix to get there, and at Annex B’s typical 5.27% it would take more than the whole mix. Protein binds first, and by a long way.

Copra meal leaves the protein alone and takes the energy out

Run the same weighted mean with copra meal and the protein column moves the other way. Annex B puts copra meal expeller at 21.00% crude protein, above the sack’s 19.50%, so adding it raises the finished protein figure. Read it at the purchase spec, the 18.0% minimum for expeller meal in 163 § 5.4.5, and a mix would have to be entirely copra meal before it reached the finisher’s 18.00% row. On the protein column this ingredient is close to inert.

What leaves the sack is energy, and reaching it means changing documents. Annex A runs to six columns and metabolisable energy is not one of them, so the target comes from Annex D Table D.1, Nutritional requirements for broiler type chicken, whose Starter (2-4 wks) column prints 2,700 / 2,800 / 2,900 kcal/kg across its Low, Med and High readings. The mix starts at the Med column’s 2,800 and stops at the same table’s Low column of 2,700. That is a choice between two of Annex D’s three columns, and the figure moves with a different pair. On it, copra meal at Annex B’s tabulated 1,800 kcal/kg crosses at exactly 10.0% of the finished weight. The switching page uses Annex D for the age ranges and works through how that table is footed.

The boldface turns out to be load-bearing. Annex B’s energy cell for copra meal carries two numbers, 1,800 and 2,119, and the table’s own note reads “Figures in bold numbers are computed based on regression equation.” The bold one is 2,119. The note says how that figure was arrived at and is silent on which of the two a reader should use, and on why some rows in the table carry one number and some two. 319 kcal/kg apart, in one cell. Take the bold figure and the same threshold moves from 10.0% to 14.68%.

And 10% has a second provenance. Feedipedia carries “For optimal performance, copra meal should be limited to 10% of the diet, with no more than 5% in the diets of young animals”, and the home-mix page works through that whole ceiling set. So an arithmetic built out of two informative Philippine annexes lands on the figure a foreign compilation already carries. Feedipedia reaches its 10% by weighing oil content, amino-acid digestibility and the risk of a lysine deficiency; this page reaches it by dividing two annexes. Two documents, the same number, and this page claims nothing more than that. None of the three Philippine standards sets such a ceiling: 163, 370 and 382 each stop at what an ingredient contains, and none of them goes on to how much of a ration it may be.

Magkano ba talaga ang binibili mo sa isang lata ng darak?

Per kilo ang board ng DA-BAI. Ang tinitingnan dito ay per point of crude protein at per 1,000 kcal of metabolisable energy, kasi iyon ang binibili ng manok at hindi ang bigat. Noong 13 July 2026: ₱14.60 per kg ang copra meal, ₱21.50 per kg ang darak, at ₱24.75 per kg ang local yellow corn, at nasa /presyo/group/feed-ingredients ang buong series na pinanggalingan ng tatlo.

Isa ang matibay dito, at totoo pa rin ito kahit aling energy figure ang piliin mo: may mas mura kaysa darak sa dalawang column. Ang copra meal ang pinakamurang protina sa tatlo sa ilalim ng bawat reading, ₱0.70 per point of crude protein laban sa ₱1.77 ng darak. Halos dalawa at kalahating beses ang layo niyan. Sa presyo kada kilo, isa at kalahating beses lang. Mas malaki po ang agwat kapag laman ang hinati mo.

The energy column is unsettled. On the tabulated figures corn buys 1,000 kcal of metabolisable energy at ₱7.50, copra meal at ₱8.11 and darak at ₱8.96. On the regression figures in the same cells the three land at ₱7.37, ₱6.89 and ₱7.20, and corn drops from cheapest of the three to dearest. The per-kilo ordering, copra meal then darak then corn, carries straight across to the protein column; the tabulated energy figures are the only one of the three sums on this page that inverts it. Two readings, two orderings.

One movement in that column survives both readings. A year earlier, on 21 July 2025, the same DA-BAI board put darak at ₱17.50 per kg and copra meal at ₱15.00, which is ₱7.29 against ₱8.33 per 1,000 kcal of metabolisable energy on the tabulated figures. Darak bought energy more cheaply then. On 13 July 2026, 357 days later, copra meal is the cheaper energy of the two under both readings. The two crossed on that column somewhere in between, and the feed price page works through the movement series by series. Both weeks are wholesale, a miller and trader board rather than an agrivet counter, and G-15 here is open on what a sack costs.

The four things that scale down with the sack

At 10% inclusion the sack contributes 90% of what it was carrying, and four of those things have no column in the ingredient table at all: calcium, phosphorus, lysine, and the premix the sack was priced on.

Calcium first. A broiler starter sitting at the bottom of Annex A’s 0.80 to 1.10% band contributes 0.72% to a mix that is a tenth darak, which is under the band’s own floor, and its 0.70% NLT phosphorus contributes 0.63%. Annex A’s own footnote calls that column total phosphorus; § 9.2.6(d)(v) of the same standard requires available phosphorus on the label. The sack declares one figure and the annex tabulates another. What the finished mix actually holds is a question with no answer in the Philippine set. That was checked at 370 Annex B’s eight columns, which run dry matter, crude protein, crude fat, crude fibre, ash, starch, ME and TDN, at 163 §§ 5.4.5, 5.4.13 and 5.4.14, and at 382 Annex A, which tabulates feed types and leaves ingredients alone. Dilution moves both minerals in a known direction by an unknown amount.

Lysine is the same shape, sharper. Annex D prints the target plainly, 0.97 / 1.01 / 1.04% for a 2 to 4 week broiler across its three columns. The ingredient figure is published nowhere in the Philippine set. And 163 § 5.7.2 specifies the purity of the synthetic supplement a formulator would buy to fix exactly that: L-lysine HCl at a minimum of 98.0%, lysine sulfate at 87.0% as L-lysine sulfate, DL-Methionine at 98.0%. The standard attaches a specification to the amino acid in the bag, in the same document whose § 5.4.5 says copra meal “has imbalanced amino acid profile”.

PNS/BAFS 163:2015 runs a whole category headed Energy Sources at §§ 4.1 and 5.1. Search either official copy for kcal, Kcal or Metabolizable and nothing comes back. The energy figures exist. They are in a different standard’s informative annex, four pages before Annex D in the same PDF.

A caution for anybody checking 163. Two official copies circulate, the BAFS register’s own and the WTO SPS notification copy; they are different files and they disagree on printed figures, including § 5.4.6’s crude protein minimum for corn bran, where one page reads 8.0% and the other 18.0%. On the copra meal and rice bran clauses used here the two agree exactly.

The premix, the limestone, the dicalcium phosphate and the synthetic amino acids scale down by the same tenth, and the home-mix page already establishes that none of the four carries a published Philippine price.

Kung darak pa rin ang ihahalo mo, ano ang titingnan mo?

Porsyento, huwag kilo. Lahat ng bilang dito ay bahagi ng tapos na timbang, at doon lang ito totoo.

Which column an ingredient moves is the thing to settle first, and the two sit side by side at the gilingan looking interchangeable. Darak moves protein and barely touches fibre. Copra meal raises protein and takes energy. Kaya bago ka maghalo, ang tanong po ay kung aling nakalimbag na numero sa sako ang gusto mong manatiling totoo, kasi iba ang porsyento kung protina iyon at iba kung energy.

The bounds all lean the same way, and that is the usable part. A sack’s declared crude protein is an NLT figure, not less than, and its declared crude fibre is an NMT figure, not more than. A real sack therefore sits at or above 19.50% protein and at or below 4.50% fibre. Both protein thresholds and the fibre one were worked from those declared numbers, so each lands on the cautious end: an actual sack will usually carry a little more before its printed figure parts company with the mix. The energy thresholds are a different sum, because they start from Annex D’s requirement columns for the bird instead of from a figure the sack declares.

And then which end of each pair to work from. A sack of darak carries no mark saying whether it sits at the 11.0% floor 163 sets or at Annex B’s 12.14% average, and Annex B leaves the choice between the two energy figures in a copra meal cell to whoever is reading it. So read each pair as a bracket and work from the lower end, which is the figure that holds under both readings: 17.65% for darak on the protein column, 10.0% for copra meal on the energy column. Below those the printed number on the tag still describes the trough on either reading. Above them it has stopped describing it on at least one.

Six of the seventeen certifications Republic Act 1556 § 5(2) requires on a feed package are nutrients: (d) minimum crude protein, (e) minimum crude fat, (f) maximum crude fibre, (g) maximum ash, (h) maximum moisture and (i) the maximum percent of mineral it contains. The storage page works through the rest of that list. Energy is absent from all seventeen. Calcium and phosphorus appear once, at item (j), and conditionally: “In the case of mixed feeds containing more than five (5) percent of mineral ingredients, the maximum percentage of calcium (Ca) or phosphorus (P).” A maximum, on calcium, offered as an alternative to phosphorus. For a layer sack, whose Annex A calcium bands run 3.80 to 4.20% and 4.00 to 4.40%, the figure a keeper needs a floor for is the one the 1956 statute asks a ceiling on. That same statute’s § 5(3) names rice bran, ipil-ipil and copra among the local by-products it expects to be sold for feed, which is a fair measure of how old this question is.

And the handover, because building a ration is a different job from diluting one. The home-mix page builds one from ingredients, with the grades, the ceilings and a worked batch. This page dilutes one that already exists. On what a damp can of darak does before it ever reaches the sack, the what-not-to-feed page is the one to read.

What usually goes wrong

1. The mistake: Reading 10.0% for copra meal or 17.65% for darak as an inclusion limit.

   Do this instead: Read each as the point where a figure printed on the tag stops describing what is in the trough.

   They are weighted means on two informative annexes and a purchase spec, and the only 10% with a feeding recommendation attached is Feedipedia’s.

2. The mistake: Expecting copra meal to lower the protein figure on the sack because it is the cheap ingredient.

   Do this instead: Check the column it actually moves. Annex B puts copra meal expeller at 21.00% crude protein, above a broiler starter’s 19.50%.

   It raises the finished protein and lowers the energy, at 1,800 kcal/kg against a 2,700 to 2,900 kcal/kg target in Annex D. Darak is the one that drags protein down, at 12.14%.

3. The mistake: Comparing darak and copra meal on the per-kilo price at the gilingan.

   Do this instead: Divide the price by the composition first, and say which nutrient you divided by.

   At DA-BAI wholesale on 13 July 2026, ₱21.50/kg darak costs ₱1.77 per point of crude protein and ₱14.60/kg copra meal costs ₱0.70. The per-kilo gap is 1.5 times. Per point of protein it is 2.5 times, on the same two prices.

4. The mistake: Treating a diluted sack as the same feed with a little more bulk in it.

   Do this instead: Scale everything the sack carried by the same fraction, minerals and premix included.

   At 10% inclusion a starter at the bottom of Annex A’s calcium band contributes 0.72% calcium and 0.63% phosphorus. What the mix holds is a further step, and the ingredient tables checked here stop at TDN.

What a can of darak actually costs

The per-kilo price understates the gap. Per kilo, darak costs ₱21.50 and copra meal ₱14.60, and that is the number on the board and the number a keeper hears at the gilingan; both series download at /data/feed-ingredient-copra-meal and its neighbours. Per 1,000 kcal of metabolisable energy the two run ₱8.96 and ₱8.11 on the tabulated figures and ₱7.20 and ₱6.89 on the regression ones, and darak is the dearer of the pair under both. Ang bumibili ng darak ay bumibili ng bigat, at mahal ang bigat na iyon kapag hinati mo sa laman.

Per point of crude protein, per kilo bought: ₱0.70 against ₱1.77. Copra meal buys two and a half points of protein for every one the same peso buys in darak, Per point of crude protein, per kilo bought: ₱0.70 against ₱1.77. The board prices the weight. Bayaran mo ang laman, hindi ang bigat.

Questions people actually ask

How much darak can I mix into commercial chicken feed?

None of PNS/BAFS 163:2015, 370:2023 or 382:2024 prints an inclusion percentage for any ingredient, so what can be worked out is a different thing: the point at which a figure printed on the sack stops describing what is in the trough. A broiler starter declaring 19.50% crude protein under Annex A of PNS/BAFS 382:2024 falls to the broiler finisher's 18.00% row at 17.65% of the finished weight if Rice Bran D1 is read at its purchase minimum of 11.0% crude protein in PNS/BAFS 163:2015 section 5.4.13, and at 20.38% if it is read at the 12.14% typical composition in Annex B of PNS/BAFS 370:2023. Its crude fibre barely moves either way. Both figures are arithmetic on the declared numbers, and because a declared protein is a minimum and a declared fibre is a maximum, both fall on the cautious side of what a real sack would give you.

Is copra meal good for chicken feed? Show the answer

Copra meal expeller carries more crude protein than a broiler starter sack does. Annex B of PNS/BAFS 370:2023 puts it at 21.00% against the sack's 19.50% minimum, so adding it raises the finished protein figure. What it lowers is energy. The same annex gives it 1,800 kcal/kg of metabolisable energy in one reading and a bold 2,119 in the other, against the 2,700 to 2,900 kcal/kg Annex D of the same standard states for a 2 to 4 week broiler. Working from the 2,800 kcal/kg middle column down to the 2,700 kcal/kg low column, the mix reaches that floor at 10.0% copra meal on the first energy figure and 14.68% on the second. PNS/BAFS 163:2015 section 5.4.5 adds the qualitative half: the meal is unpalatable at high inclusion rates and has imbalanced amino acid profile.

Which is cheaper, darak or copra meal? Show the answer

Per kilo, copra meal. At DA-BAI wholesale in the week of 13 July 2026, copra meal was ₱14.60 per kg, Rice Bran D1 was ₱21.50 and local yellow corn was ₱24.75. Per unit of nutrient the gap is wider than the per-kilo price suggests. Using the compositions in Annex B of PNS/BAFS 370:2023, copra meal buys crude protein at ₱0.70 per point per kilo, darak at ₱1.77 and corn at ₱3.07. Per 1,000 kcal of metabolisable energy the ordering depends on which of the two energy figures in Annex B you take, and it flips for corn between them. Darak is never the cheapest of the three on either column, and that holds under both energy readings. Corn is the dearest per point of protein, at ₱3.07.

Does adding darak to feed lower the calcium? Show the answer

It lowers every nutrient the sack carried that the added ingredient does not carry, in proportion. At 10% inclusion the sack contributes 90% of what it held, so a broiler starter sitting at the bottom of Annex A's 0.80 to 1.10% calcium band contributes 0.72% to the mix, and its 0.70% minimum phosphorus contributes 0.63%. What the finished mix actually holds is a different question and it cannot be answered from Philippine documents, because Annex B of PNS/BAFS 370:2023 publishes eight columns for each ingredient and calcium and phosphorus are absent from all eight, and sections 5.4.5, 5.4.13 and 5.4.14 of PNS/BAFS 163:2015 spec proximate figures and, for copra meal, salt. The premix, the limestone and the dicalcium phosphate in the sack scale down by the same tenth.