“The ranchers get the grain, and the brewers get those leftovers removed from their facilities for free.”
And the government can’t make any money on the deal.
This is one of the stupider rules/laws I’ve seen from the FDA in a while. It’s also a good lesson in how the private sector can sometime makes lemons from lemonade if allowed to figure out a solution. There was a similar scenario back in the 1980’s/90’s between film processing companies and plant food makers. One of the biggest waste products of film processing apparently was an essential compound in plant foods (can’t remember what it was). The plant food companies took the waste off the film producer/processors hands and both industries got a sweet deal.
Similar kind of thing happened when power plants had to start scrubbing their flue gases for sulphur. The byproduct of that is a synthetic gypsum. This stuff is 95% pure and the purity s nearly constant. We figured out we could use it to make sheetrock with some minor modifications to our plants (it is a little denser than natural rock). So now most sheetrock made in the eastern US is made out of coal power plant waste, that used to go straight to the landfill.
Another one: the photographic film industry needed gelatin for the products...becoming the biggest consumer of animal bones leftover from meat processing.