Are there seasonal trends in ingredient prices that I should watch?

If there are then what opportunities I have to capture deals?

Absolutely. Although each ingredient is different, and weather can effective these seasonal trends year-to-year, there are definitely price trends that will allow you lock in prices cheaper than your neighbor, especially if you have storage space that you can utilize. A perfect example of this is whole cottonseed, where cotton gins in the southern United States need to move seed out of their gins in October-December, a timeframe know as “gin-run”, in order to make room for the incoming cotton crop. This is almost always the cheapest timeframe that a dairyman can buy whole cottonseed, and if he has any storage where he can warehouse cottonseed during this timeframe, he can buy seed for October-December delivery, and store it for the upcoming months, while other dairymen are forced to pay the increasing seed prices. Another trend we see, although not as seasonal as our previous example, is the need for processors to move weekend production out of their mills, mostly due to a lack of storage at their facilities. We often see this with flour mills and ethanol plants, which will sometimes run seven days per week, but only have enough storage to hold one day’s production of by-products. If you have the transportation available to load these byproducts over the weekend, you can often buy weekend product several dollars per ton cheaper than that sold during weekdays. Again, I strongly encourage producers to speak with a feed ingredient trading company who is dealing with these processors on a daily basis, and knows where the “deals” are in the market.