Reviewed September 2026 against USDA Agricultural Marketing Service by-product drop value reports and USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026.

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Products from Cow, Mining: Most Profitable US Exports

A single cow yields far more than beef: hide, tallow, blood meal, bone meal, and organ offal each have a separate cash market, and USDA tracks their combined worth as a per-animal “drop value” every week. Separately, US mining sends copper and gold overseas by the hundreds of thousands of tons and hundreds of tons respectively, worth billions of dollars a year, per USGS. This article covers both topics with the actual current numbers and tells you exactly where to check them next month, because both markets move weekly and annually.

Products from a Cow: What By-Products Actually Sell For

When a beef animal is processed, the packer separates it into the primal cuts sold as meat and a second stream of by-products — hide, fat, blood, bone, and internal organs — that get rendered or tanned into separate commodities. The industry term for the combined cash value of this second stream, expressed per hundredweight of live animal, is the “drop value” or “hide and offal value,” and USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) publishes it weekly.

As of the week of June 19, 2026, USDA AMS reported the beef hide and offal drop value at $15.43 per hundredweight (cwt) of live weight — meaning for every 100 pounds a live animal weighs, roughly $15.43 of that value comes from the by-product stream alone, before a single cut of meat is counted. That figure is published in the same weekly report (AMS 2834 / NW_LS444 series) that carries the individual commodity prices below, so it’s read alongside the tallow and meal prices, not derived separately.

Breaking that drop value into its components, for the week of August 24–28, 2026, USDA AMS reported:

• 🛢️ Packer bleachable tallow (rendered beef fat, used in soap, animal feed, and biodiesel feedstock): $0.755 to $0.775 per pound
• 🦴 Meat and bone meal, 50% protein grade (rendered into livestock and poultry feed): $525 per ton
• 🩸 Blood meal, 85% protein grade (a high-protein feed additive, especially for swine and poultry rations): $1,422 per ton

Blood meal’s price per ton is roughly 2.7 times meat and bone meal’s, which reflects its much higher protein concentration (85% versus 50%) — protein content, not volume, is what rendering plants price against.

Cow By-Product Price Table

These four numbers answer “cow by-products,” “products of a cow,” “cow by-products” (hyphenated), “by products of a cow,” and “products from a cow” as the same underlying question: what does the non-meat stream of a beef animal actually sell for, right now, on a real published market. The honest caveat: USDA’s drop value report gives price per animal or per unit weight of the by-product itself — it does not publish a national aggregate tonnage of all beef by-products produced per year. If you need total US production volume in metric tons, that figure is not in USDA’s weekly drop value series; it would have to come from USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) slaughter statistics combined with rendering-industry yield estimates, which is a separate dataset from the pricing report cited here.

Similarly, the multiplier applied when a raw by-product is processed further — hide into finished leather, tallow into oleochemicals — is not published as a standard industry ratio in the drop value report. A rendering plant or tannery calculating margin would need its own processing cost data; USDA’s weekly report only prices the by-product at the point it leaves the packer.

Calculator: Estimate Your Cattle’s By-Product Drop Value

Enter your animal’s live weight and the current per-cwt drop value (default is the USDA figure above) to estimate total by-product value per head, and scale it across a herd.

Assumptions: uses the USDA AMS drop value method (dollars per hundredweight of live animal weight) as published for the week of June 19, 2026. Excludes any premium or discount for hide grade, quality defects, or regional rendering plant differentials, and excludes transport or processing costs. Update the drop value field with the current week's figure from the source above for an accurate estimate.

Mining Exports: What the US Actually Ships Out

Switching topics entirely: "mining exports" as a search most often means US mineral commodity trade, and the two largest, best-documented flows are copper and gold. USGS's Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 — the annual reference for US mineral production and trade — puts a specific number on both.

For 2025, USGS reports US copper mine production at 1.0 million tons of recoverable copper, valued at $11 billion domestically. Of that, the US exported 340,000 tons of copper ore and concentrate and a further 110,000 tons of refined copper. Gold mine production for the same year was 160 tons, valued at $17 billion domestically — gold's much higher value-per-ton than copper reflects price, not volume — and the US exported 260 tons of gold, which is more than domestic mine output, meaning re-exports of previously imported or recycled gold make up part of that flow.

Zooming out from single commodities, USGS's summary of total 2025 US mineral trade reports net exports of mineral raw materials at $5.6 billion and net exports of old scrap materials at $13 billion, against a total domestic mineral production value of $112 billion for the year. Scrap — recycled metal reprocessed back into the trade stream — is a larger net export category than raw mineral materials, which is a detail easy to miss if you only look at mine production figures.

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US Mining Export Comparison Table

Copper, Gold, and the Categories Behind Them

1. Copper: Volume Leader

Copper's 1.0 million tons of 2025 mine production makes it the higher-volume of the two headline metals, feeding electrical wiring, construction, and renewable-energy infrastructure both domestically and through the 340,000 tons of ore/concentrate and 110,000 tons of refined metal the US exported that year. The split between ore/concentrate exports and refined exports matters commercially: refined copper commands a processing premium over concentrate, which is why domestic smelting and refining capacity is a recurring policy and investment topic in the sector.

2. Gold: Value Leader Per Ton

At $17 billion for 160 tons of mine production, gold's per-ton value dwarfs copper's — the same weight of gold is worth roughly 100 times more than copper, purely on 2025 pricing. Gold exports of 260 tons exceeding domestic mine production of 160 tons is the detail worth flagging: it means the US gold export stream includes material beyond fresh mine output, most plausibly recycled and previously-imported gold moving back through refining and bullion channels. USGS's summaries don't break that gap down further in the topline figures, so anyone needing the exact split between newly mined and re-exported gold would need to consult the detailed trade tables within the full USGS gold commodity report, not just the summary figures cited here.

3. Beyond Copper and Gold: The Gap in Public Data

The $5.6 billion net export figure for mineral raw materials covers far more than copper and gold — lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements are all part of the strategic minerals conversation, and each has its own export story. However, the research behind this article did not surface a verified per-commodity breakdown of that $5.6 billion total by individual mineral for 2025. If you need lithium, cobalt, or rare-earth-specific export values, the source to check is the full USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, which publishes an individual commodity PDF for each mineral (the copper and gold PDFs cited here follow the same format) at USGS's periodicals page — the topline $5.6 billion figure used in this article is the aggregate, not a stand-in for any single commodity within it.

Satellite-Based Mineral Discovery: Farmonaut's Role

Whatever the eventual export tonnage, discovery starts with exploration — and that's where satellite-based mineral detection changes the cost structure. Farmonaut's multispectral and hyperspectral analytics screen large areas for the spectral signatures of copper, gold, and other minerals before a field team is ever deployed, cutting exploration cost by an estimated 80–85% relative to ground-survey-first methods and compressing the discovery timeline from months to days.

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A Note on "Metagenomi" Searches

A small number of readers land on this page searching for Metagenomi, Inc. common stock analyst estimates. To be direct about it: Metagenomi is a biotechnology company (gene-editing platform technology), and its stock analyst estimates are not a cow by-products or mining export topic — there is no factual connection between the two subjects, and this article does not cover equity research or analyst estimates for any public company. If you're researching Metagenomi's stock specifically, the appropriate sources are a financial data provider (such as a brokerage research platform or SEC filings at sec.gov) rather than an agriculture or mining site. We're noting this plainly rather than stretching this article to cover unrelated ground, which would serve neither search intent well.

How to Keep These Numbers Current

Both halves of this article rest on data that gets republished on a fixed schedule, which means the method for checking freshness is different for each:

• 📅 Cow by-product prices (tallow, meal, hide/offal drop value): USDA AMS republishes its by-product drop value report weekly. Search "AMS 2834" or the NW_LS444 series at ams.usda.gov/mnreports. A price more than a few weeks old should be treated as historical context, not a current quote.
• 📅 Mining export volumes and values (copper, gold, total mineral trade): USGS publishes Mineral Commodity Summaries annually, typically released in the May–June window, covering the prior calendar year's final figures. The current edition is at USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, with commodity-specific PDFs (copper, gold, and others) linked from that index.

The durable method here, regardless of which year you're reading this in: for cow by-products, go to the weekly USDA drop value report and read the current week's tallow, meal, and hide/offal figures directly rather than trusting a number quoted secondhand. For mining exports, go to the most recent annual USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries edition and read the individual commodity PDF (copper, gold, or whichever mineral you need) rather than a blended prior-year figure. Both source types are free, public, and updated on a predictable cycle, so "is this number still right" is always a one-click check away.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Conclusion

Products from a cow — tallow at $0.755–$0.775 per pound, meat and bone meal at $525 per ton, blood meal at $1,422 per ton, and a combined hide-and-offal drop value of $15.43 per cwt live weight — are priced weekly by USDA AMS, and that weekly report is the one source to check for a current number. US mining exports, led by copper (340,000 tons ore/concentrate plus 110,000 tons refined in 2025) and gold (260 tons, against $17 billion in domestic mine production value), are documented annually by USGS, against a total 2025 US mineral production value of $112 billion and net exports of $5.6 billion in raw materials plus $13 billion in scrap.

Both markets reward checking the primary source directly rather than trusting a fixed number: cattle by-product prices move weekly with commodity and feed markets, and mining export figures update annually as USGS finalizes the prior year's trade data. For mineral exploration specifically, satellite-based detection is what shortens the path from raw prospect to exportable ore — cutting cost and time before a single drill goes into the ground.

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