Soybeans are cheap, why isn't chicken feed?

Am I naïve to expect that poultry feed should be very cheap in the USA right now? American farmers are stockpiling their crops of all the major commodity grains because prices are so low with the loss of international buyers. So when does the price of a sack of all flock in the USA go down?

Depending on the economics, the actual cost of the volume of soya beans in chook feed
may not be much. But that needs to be discovered.
Also, maybe if the farmers stop growing soyas that will cause a stress point as well, so helping them at the moment may work out well for everybody.

First off, here in Canada, we don't feed chickens soybeans. They contain phytoestrogens and too much of those can mess with fertility.

Secondly, if the processors are using the lack of a market as an excuse to pay the farmers less, the farmers may be better off either stockpiling or putting the grain back on the soil rather than selling at a loss. I've heard that being done with milk, and the soil benefited greatly.

Thirdly, a huge part of the costs are fixed regardless - transportation, processing, bagging, shelf space at the store... it goes on and on. You might find that the cost of the grain vs the cost of everything else is minimal.

I would look for one of those farmers you mention, or ideally several as chickens need a varied diet, and see if you can buy direct and mix your own feed?

They stopped using soy in the local small (under 10k) flock chicken feed production about 10 years ago due to "long term health issues".  When pushed, the unofficial stance of the feed company hinted at cancer, reproductive issues, and antinutrients in soy that blocked the absorbed of important nutrients. And suggested fermenting soy and limiting it to less than 5% of a chickens diet as filler, not nutrition, if we still wanted to use soy.

This is also the time we stopped getting cancer in our chickens.

Also, it's more profitable to sell soy overseas or use it in bioplastics industry than to sell it to a feed company.

Ingredients are cheap. A 50 pound bag of corn at the local farm store is about $10. Processing, cracking and cooking and delivering is what costs. Back in the day my dad fed several hundred hogs every day. It paid for him to buy a large mill powered by a tractor rather than buy ready-made feed.