Dairy farms have become increasingly more expensive to operate, and with the cost of feed for cows as the single largest expense, it is crucial to examine the economics of feed shrink. Feed costs make up approximately 50% of operating costs on a dairy farm and are rarely monitored as they should be. Feed shrink in the animal agriculture industry is defined as “lost resources that never had the potential for economic return” (Greene, 2014). Shrink disappearance can occur in both forages and purchased commodity ingredients. Disappearance shrink may be observed by contamination, poor fermentation and management of forages, wind or other weather-related disappearance, and pest animals. “Feeder” shrink is caused by employee error and inaccuracy of feed ingredient utilization at the time of feeding. Farm location, feed center size, and storage type all can have a significant effect on the amount of both disappearance and feeder shrink. This project examined eleven New York dairy farms that agreed to have their businesses analyzed through an economic and operational lens. Farms ranged in size from 900 to 2000 milking and dry cows with a total exceeding 15,000. Each farm’s feed center is unique in size and setup in which some consist of a mix of upright grain bins and commodity sheds whereas some had solely one or the other. It was observed that all farms in this study were concerned about shrink on their respective dairy but had never deeply examined its effect on their profitability. This project aims to determine the economic value of shrink for purchased concentrate, commodities, and forages by storage type and as a whole. Once a value is identified, potential solutions will be offered to each specific dairy if deemed necessary based on the data provided. To understand the impact and severity of feed shrink, farms allowed the observation and collection of data from feeding software (FeedWatch or TMR Tracker) and forage yield data sets. Feed mills and commodity distributors shared delivery data to each farm for each of the purchased ingredients. The data was collected during the window of June 1, 2023, to July 18, 2023. Feeder error may also lead to compromised cattle health and production losses which will further negatively impact farm profitability. While this is tied to shrink and the economics of shrink, it was not examined in this project. The second aim of this project was to help client farms identify opportunities within individual ingredients to reduce shrink on their farms. This will be presented to each farm as a confidential report comparing their data to the rest of the study participants. This paper will discuss some of the individual farm’s data and why they may have varying levels of shrink compared to peers. The major findings from this 47-day study are as follows. All purchased feeds had an average of 5.42% combined total shrink in all storage types. All upright bins in this study had an average of 3.06% total shrink and an average of $1316 per farm during the study period. 3-sided commodity bays had an average of 8.06% total shrink and $5733 lost per farm. This amounts to an average cost of approximately $0.095/head/per day across all participant herds.