Why Bother Extruding Corn?
It’s important to have an open mind. However, it’s easy to fall into a pattern that’s comfortable and repeatable, until one day, what you’re doing doesn’t make nearly as much sense as it used to.
For years, myself and others at Insta-Pro have been challenged to justify dry extruding corn (or maize depending on where you’re from). Unlike soybeans and other ingredients, which require thermal processing like dry extrusion to be useful in feeding programs, raw ground corn works very well in diets for numerous species. It’s inexpensive and grown in many places, and is shipped to nearly every country in the world, so why bother doing much to it?
Here is why you should consider dry extrusion of corn:
- Highly gelatinize the starch in corn, making it more digestible to animals. Typically, this means an increased energy value, improved performance, and increased feed efficiency (less feed to get the same or greater weight gain).
- Significantly reduce or eliminate bacteria, viruses, and toxins in lower-quality corn.
- Create a source of highly-available starch for rumen microbes, which will stimulate ruminal microbial protein, and in the right formulations, improve milk production in dairy animals.
- Remember I said corn is inexpensive? Use this to your advantage. Could you purchase low-cost corn, dry extrude it, and then sell a value-added, higher-priced ingredient that would solve problems for your customers?
Seeing these real market and animal benefits, Insta-Pro went to work developing new high shear, dry extrusion technology. Extruding corn can be difficult because the starch wants to expand inside the barrel, and this quick change can make the extrusion process difficult to control. We now have a solution in a modified barrel design that allows for a controllable process.
Speak with us about dry extruding corn and how it offers new solutions for your customers.
