Every so often I get someone who brings up the price of our freight online. We charge .70 per lb for freight as we ship UPS and USPS. The retail shipping price for UPS is over $1 per lb. but because of our shipping volume we get a much better freight rate, which we pass those savings on to you. I put together a spread sheet that should turn the light bulb on in a variety of ways.
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One could buy a 1/2 acre bag of Grandpa Ray’s Mass Builder that plants 1/2 acre or one could buy a big box store blend that they say also plants 1/2 acre. Ours is .99 per bag less than theirs. If one looked at the tags, we do not use coated seeds in our mass builder and many other options have 35% coated seeds in theirs. When one does the math, you will see that we have 4.24 lbs of pure live seed in our bag and they have 2.59 lbs. Stop and chew on that. They say their bag plants the same amount of land and yet they have 1.65 lbs less seed in that half acre bag. That would mean that our seed costs you $9.91 per pound of pure live seed and theirs actually costs $15.41 per lb. That means their seed delivered to your door free actually costs you over 55% more. Not such a value after all to get free delivery.
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Let’s now consider yield. Mass builder will actually yield year one 1.95 tons of forage dry matter per acre on that 1/2 acre plot. Popular option ABC would yield 1.2 tons and that would be very generous. In this example i’m giving them the benefit of the doubt that their coated seeds will yield the same as our uncoated seeds at the different seeding rates per acre. I don’t believe it for one minute but let’s go with it for this purpose. Actual forage values per acre for quality forages are around $200 per ton of forage dry matter if one had to buy forage. Mass builder would provide an extra $150 of forage value per half acre year 1. When one gets out the calculator and compares, Mass Builder nets an advantage of $147.99 over the big box store seed that you can buy with free shipping.
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People, there are no free lunches. Free freight is just a marketing game. Grandpa Ray Outdoors puts actual seed in our bags and sells genetics and blends that will out yield other options. Know what your buying and know G.R.O. does what other don’t and won’t.
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