Most cottonseed meal is used as animal feed, especially for beef and
dairy cattle. Purchased in garden stores in small containers it is
very expensive; bought by the 50-to 80-pound sack from feed stores
or farm coops, cottonseed meal and other oil seed meals are quite
inexpensive. Though prices of these types of commodities vary from
year to year, oil cakes of all kinds usually cost between $200 to
$400 per ton and only slightly higher purchased sacked in
less-than-ton lots.

The price of any seed meal is strongly influenced by freight costs.
Cottonseed meal is cheapest in the south and the southwest where
cotton is widely grown. Soybean meal may be more available and
priced better in the midwest. Canadian gardeners are discovering
canola meal, a byproduct from producing canola (or rapeseed) oil.
When I took a sabbatical in Fiji, I advised local gardeners to use
coconut meal, an inexpensive "waste" from extracting coconut oil.
And I would not be at all surprised to discover gardeners in South
Dakota using sunflower meal. Sesame seed, safflower seed, peanut and
oil-seed corn meals may also be available in certain localities.

Seed meals make an ideal starting point for compounding complete
organic fertilizer mixes. The average NPK analysis of most seed
meals is around 6-4-2. Considered as a fertilizer, oil cakes are
somewhat lacking in phosphorus and sometimes in trace minerals. By
supplementing them with materials like bone meal, phosphate rock,
kelp meal, sometimes potassium-rich rock dusts and lime or gypsum, a
single, wide-spectrum slow-release trace-mineral-rich organic
fertilizer source can be blended at home having an analysis of about
5-5-5. Cottonseed meal is particularly excellent for this purpose