What Nobody Publishes: Data Gaps in Philippine Poultry

Magkano ang sako ng feeds? This country publishes no answer to that, and it is not the only question in that state.

Here is what a keeper needs a figure for, and what the country publishes against each one. Five of the eight lines carry nothing in the third column, at kasama sa lima ang dalawang pinakamalaking gastos sa bawat batch.

The first five lines are entries in this archive’s gaps register, G-15, G-16, G-5, G-1 and G-6, where each one carries what was checked against it and on what date. The register lists what is missing; this table sets it beside what is published. The peso figure and the series count are read out of the archive when this page is built.

Everything a keeper sells is measured. Almost everything a keeper buys is not. The five decisions before a first flock tells a beginner to stop hunting for three figures in particular: a national feed sack price, a reliable profit-per-bird number, and a backyard performance benchmark.

Start with the sack, kasi iyon ang pinakamalaking gastos sa bawat batch at iyon din ang pinakamadalas hanapin. It is the largest single line in a batch and there is no current published Philippine price for one. A full day of looking turned up two published peso figures per sack-equivalent, and neither of them is a price anybody paid for a bag of feed. It sits in the register as gap G-15.

Eight routes to a sack price, and what each one returned

The August 2026 survey behind this archive went looking for a table and worked through 265 PSA OpenSTAT tables, all 40 BAI report categories and the DA Bantay Presyo weekly PDF. Not one of the three carries a sack price. The second pass went looking for the figure instead, in the places a number hides when no table carries it, and every route in the left-hand column below was checked on 13 August 2026.

Read the right-hand column and the failure is not that the searching stopped too early. Two of the eight routes returned a real, published, dated peso figure per sack-equivalent, and neither is a record of a transaction: a tender ceiling authorises spending up to an amount nobody has yet spent, and a per-ton figure quoted to make a point about tariffs was never an observation of a market. Closing G-15 takes a person ringing named dealers and writing the brand, the tier and the date beside every quote.

BAI prices what goes into the sack, never the sack

What the Bureau of Animal Industry does publish is 15 feed ingredients, weekly, in pesos per kilo, at wholesale. That series is real and it is worth reading; what has moved across it since 2023 is a page of its own.

There is no arithmetic that gets you from those fifteen rows to a sack. Adding them together sums fifteen different ingredients as though each one were a whole ration, at walang inilalathalang inclusion ratio ang BAI, so the total is not the cost of any formulation and sits well above the real ingredient cost of one. Beyond that a sack carries the milling, the bag, the miller’s margin and then the dealer’s, and none of those four is published anywhere by anybody.

Where a peso figure for a sack is needed anywhere on this site, ₱1,800 per 50 kg stands in as an illustration with no observation under it. Huwag mong dalhin ang numerong iyon sa sarili mong plano. The feed cost tool asks you for the figure on the sack in front of you instead.

Performance and density are missing where they change the answer

A batch either clears its costs or it does not, and the line that decides it is feed. Assume a feed conversion of 1.6, then assume 2.4, and the feed bill moves by roughly a third measured off the higher of the two. That pair is the register’s own illustration of the sensitivity under G-1, not a measurement of any flock. The nearest Philippine figures are narrower, still describe somebody else’s birds, and are targets rather than results: Datuin et al. (2022) put 1.50 to 1.83 on the open-sided row of its target table, which is 16 growers out of the 48 it split by housing, as what those sixteen were aiming at, and a third of that grower group said they reach the aim only sometimes or not at all. Aviagen’s day-28 row puts the same bird at 1.257 in a controlled house. Walang sumukat pa ng manok sa bakuran, kaya walang Philippine average para sa backyard feed conversion, mortality, days to market weight o lay rate. Plan the feed line as a band and carry both ends into your budget, which is why the 50-bird batch cost runs 2.6 to 3.1 sacks and never prints a total.

Density is worse, because the substitution is easier to miss. PNS/BAFS 262:2018 sets 10 broilers per m² or 17 kg per m² in fixed housing, and 6 birds per m² for layers and native chickens. For broilers and for native chickens raised for meat those are the only Philippine stocking densities published by anybody, and the standard they sit in covers free range chicken, a production system with an outdoor range attached. Hens have a second figure that this register missed until August 2026: PNS/BAFS 312:2021 § 6.2 sets a cage-free requirement of 0.14 m² a bird single-tier and 0.1 m² multi-tier, scoped by its own § 1 to smallholders and written for “a building, room, or enclosed area”, which is a closed coop by another name. Saradong kulungan ang karamihan ng manok sa bakuran dito, at marami sa mga iyon ay hindi lumalabas kahit kailan. Using a free-range indoor figure for a confined coop is the best available substitution and it is still a substitution, at ang nagsisiksik ng manok dahil dito ay magbabayad sa mortality kapag mainit ang mga buwan. That one is G-18. The coop tool runs the PNS figure and names the standard as free-range on every result it prints.

The vaccine line has no series behind it either. There is no retail price for Newcastle disease vaccine, fowl pox, or the equipment that goes with them, by region or by pack size, because agrivet dealers quote per order and per customer. That is G-5, a real line in a startup budget with no published number under it. Itanong mo sa vet o sa agri-supply at isulat mo ang petsa sa tabi ng kanilang sagot.

Then the one nobody can close. Official counts record culled birds on reported farms. Ang mga manok na namamatay sa bakuran na walang nag-uulat ay hindi nabibilang kahit saan. G-6 is marked permanent in the register, the only entry carrying that status, because the mechanism that would count those birds does not exist rather than because nobody has got round to running it.

Two mechanisms decide which figures exist

These are structural gaps rather than an agency backlog, and the two mechanisms behind them are specific enough to name.

BAI can price 15 feed ingredients because millers and traders move them at a wholesale level somebody can stand at and observe. The finished sack one step later is quoted verbally, per dealer, per customer, at nag-iiba pa iyon depende kung suki ka o hindi, so there is no list to collect and no counter to stand at. Same commodity, one step apart in the chain, and only one of the two steps leaves a record behind it.

The second mechanism is the survey instrument. PSA’s farmgate series is a production survey and its respondent is a producer, so a backyard household enters that frame as a seller of manok and itlog and never as a buyer of feeds, sisiw or bakuna. That is why eleven national output prices exist for a single month while the input side of the same archive holds one figure. PSA’s business is agricultural production statistics; an input bought by a household from a private dealer at a price the two of them negotiated is not a production statistic, and the gap sits exactly where the mandate stops.

That one input figure carries the same split inside itself. ₱33.50 per head for the week of 13 July 2026 is BAI’s integrator and wholesale farmgate reading. Ang binabayaran ng backyard sa dealer para sa 20 sisiw ay wala sa kahit anong talaan. This archive’s own series catalogue once carried an anchor for that dealer level and struck it out, because no source could be found for it. Ang numerong walang pinanggalingan ay hindi numero, kahit sa sariling talaan mo ito nakasulat. What survives is the split itself, logged as G-16: the wholesale figure is published and the counter price is not, and the two are never blended.

The published half looks like this. Ang huling dalawa sa apat na dala ng kahon, ang report at ang araw ng pagbasa, ang unang nawawala kapag naging naka-bold na numero na lang ang figure sa gitna ng pangungusap.

And that stamp is not one reading out of many. It is the input side entire. Below is every figure BAI has published for it, from the first report of January 2023 to the week of 13 July 2026, on one axis. The breaks in the line are weeks with nothing behind them, and the caption names each one: the week the report went out with N/A in that column, and the stretches where no report went out at all. The Presyo page for this series draws only its last 60 rows, kaya nasa labas noon ang mga unang taon.

₱20₱30₱40₱50₱60

DOC

Jul 2023Jan 2024Jul 2024Jan 2025Jul 2025Jan 2026Jul 2026

Axis starts at ₱20, not ₱0.

109 monthly observations from BAI: Weekly Prices of Livestock, Poultry and Feed Ingredients, as of 2023-01-20 to as of 2026-07-13. DOC starts at PHP 39.50 per head in as of 2023-01-20 and ends at PHP 33.50 in as of 2026-07-13. Highest PHP 55.50 in as of 2024-09-23, lowest PHP 22.36 in as of 2025-12-15. One period has no published figure: as of 2023-08-18. No figure was published between as of 2024-03-15 and as of 2024-05-24. No figure was published between as of 2024-11-04 and as of 2025-01-27. No figure was published between as of 2025-03-03 and as of 2025-04-28. Every value, with its source, is on the Presyo page for this series.

See all 109 observations on the Presyo page →

Sabihin mo sa akin kung paano ipinagbibili ang isang bagay, at masasabi ko sa iyo kung may makikita kang numero tungkol dito. What that predicts is which figures are worth an evening of searching, and it does not promise that the rest cannot be collected by anybody. The regional farmgate spread is retrievable today from the PSA farmgate database this archive reads, which carries 111 geolocation values including provinces and regions, and nobody here has pulled it: that is G-7, and the archive article works through what the national-only figure costs a reader. G-15 closes the day somebody rings enough dealers.

What to do with a number that does not exist

Split the register by who can close each entry and the evening you were going to spend searching goes somewhere better.

Two of them are yours. The sack price at your own dealer, G-15, needs one walk and a notebook: starter, grower and finisher, the sack weight and the date beside each quote. Ang presyo sa harap mo ang babayaran mo, hindi ang katamtaman ng buong bansa. Your own flock’s performance, G-1, takes three batches, a weighing scale and a record of what went in and what came out, and at the end of it your own notebook holds the closest thing to a measurement of a Philippine backyard flock that exists, because nothing else in the field measures one.

Three of them need an institution, and no amount of your own time substitutes for one. G-18 closes when BAFS publishes a density standard for confined housing, or when PCAARRD, UPLB or CLSU measure density against mortality in Philippine village housing, and neither of those is known to be in progress. G-5 closes with an agrivet dealer survey, the same instrument G-3 needs for feed brands and tiers. G-7 closes when somebody pulls a regional breakdown PSA already publishes, which is the cheapest of the three and has been sitting there the whole time.

One has no route at all. G-6, the birds that die in unreported bakuran flocks during an outbreak wave, is the only entry in the register marked permanent, at hindi iyon mabubuksan ng mas magaling na paghahanap.

That sorting also hands you a test to run on somebody else’s page, and it is a narrower instrument than the six provenance questions, which ask any figure which table it came off, which date it describes, whose birds it counted, what unit it is in, whether its link lands on an agency or on a news site, and when somebody last looked. These four are gap-specific: the number does not exist, kaya ang mismong pagbanggit dito nang may kumpiyansa ang tell.

A national sack price stated without a dealer, a place and a date is the first one. There is nothing anybody could have read it off. The second is any blended peso-per-kilo feed figure at all: this site’s sister pork project once published a blended ₱39 per kilo for hog feeds that came out higher than any of the feeds it claimed to be averaging, and it was withdrawn. Blending is how an unpublished price gets manufactured out of published ones.

The third is a feed conversion given as a single point instead of a band. Nobody has measured a Philippine backyard flock, so a point figure is either a breed-company target with its label taken off or somebody’s guess. The fourth is a stocking density quoted without saying that PNS/BAFS 262:2018 is a free-range standard. A page that gives you 10 birds per m² for a closed coop has not read what the standard covers.

The gaps register carries the whole list, every entry with what was checked against it, the date it was last checked, and the workaround, which is what gets printed on the page in place of the missing number. Read the workaround line first. Fair warning that the register runs wider than poultry data and also holds this site’s own unanswered business questions, so the gaps above are a subset of what you will find there.

The other half of the same account is the archive itself, which on 15 August 2026 held 49 series and 30 registered sources behind 4,655 rows, 4,650 of them live and the retracted ones left in place. Every one of the 49 comes out as CSV with the source and the reading date on every row, and the series pages are at the price archive. Then go and collect the two numbers nobody can collect for you, at isulat mo ang petsa sa tabi ng bawat isa.

And this is the one input series in full, so that anybody quoting the figure above quotes BAI for it rather than this page.

Where this comes from

What it measures

What a broiler day-old chick costs per head at farmgate, from the Bureau of Animal Industry’s weekly monitoring.

Unit

₱/head

Geography

PH

Covers

2023-01-20 – 2026-07-13

Observations

109

Source

• BAI: Weekly Prices of Livestock, Poultry and Feed Ingredients

Download the whole series

/data/doc-price

How to cite this

BAI: Weekly Prices of Livestock, Poultry and Feed Ingredients. Day-old chick price. Compiled by Manoknomics, manoknomics.com/presyo.

See what is missing, and what was tried

Cite this page

Every figure here carries the source it came from and the date it was read. If you use one, this is the line that says where it came from.

A backyard poultry keeper. "What Nobody Publishes: Data Gaps in Philippine Poultry". Manoknomics. Published August 22, 2026. https://manoknomics.com/articles/philippine-poultry-data-gaps

Select the text to copy it.

Questions people actually ask

Where can I find Philippine poultry statistics?

The Philippine Statistics Authority publishes farmgate and retail prices for chicken and eggs, monthly, national and by region, through its OpenSTAT database, plus inventory and production volume in the Livestock and Poultry Bulletin. The Bureau of Animal Industry publishes weekly price monitoring covering the day-old chick farmgate price and 15 feed ingredients in pesos per kilo. Between them they cover what a producer sells. Input prices paid by a household, such as a sack of finished feed or a vaccine, are not published by either.

Why does the Philippines not publish a feed price? Show the answer

Because Philippine feed is priced per dealer and quoted verbally, so there is no list for a statistical agency to collect. BAI publishes 15 feed ingredients weekly at wholesale in pesos per kilo, which is raw material rather than a finished sack, and a sack additionally carries milling, packaging, the rest of the formulation and two margins. Checked on 13 August 2026 against BAI, USDA FAS GAIN, PIDS, LGU procurement postings, the manufacturers own sites, retailer pages and marketplace listings, no current published Philippine sack price was found. Two routes did return published pesos: an eight-year-old figure quoted per ton for 2018 inside a tariff argument, and a government tender ceiling. Neither is a price anybody paid.

How many chickens fit in a square metre? Show the answer

For a meat bird the only Philippine figure published by anybody is PNS/BAFS 262:2018, which sets 10 broilers per square metre or 17 kg per square metre in fixed housing, whichever binds first, and 6 birds per square metre for layers and native chickens. That standard covers free range chicken, meaning a system with an outdoor range attached, so for a closed coop its indoor figure is a substitution rather than a match. Hens are the exception: PNS/BAFS 312:2021 sets a cage-free space requirement of 0.14 square metres per bird in single-tier housing and 0.1 in multi-tier, written for a building or enclosed area rather than a range.

What is the feed conversion ratio of backyard chickens in the Philippines? Show the answer

No published Philippine average exists for backyard feed conversion, mortality, days to market weight or lay rate under village conditions. Assuming 1.6 rather than 2.4 moves a feed bill by roughly a third, measured off the higher of the two, which is why a plan should carry a range instead of a point. The nearest Philippine figures describe commercial farms rather than backyards, and they are aims rather than outcomes: Datuin et al. (2022) surveyed 55 commercial broiler farms, split the 48 contract growers among them by housing, and collected feed conversion targets of 1.50 to 1.83 from the 16 open-sided ones, while a third of those growers said they meet their targets only sometimes or not at all. Aviagen puts the same bird at 1.257 on its day-28 row in controlled housing.