Don’t Undervalue Oil or Meal
Recently, you may have noticed a sharp decline in the price of gasoline. This is certainly good news for anyone who drives, but it has led to speculation about the reasons behind falling oil prices and how long this will last (see here).
When the price of gasoline decreases, it creates a domino effect across other markets. For example, vegetable oil from oilseed crops, like soybeans, is used to make biofuels, therefore, falling crude oil prices reduce demand for biofuels, pushing vegetable oil prices down.
We work with customers all over the world who use our equipment to mechanically extract oil from various oilseeds. Following high-shear extrusion, the resulting extruded product is squeezed in a press to separate the oil from the solid oil cake. This oil cake is then cooled and ground into ExPress ® soy meal, a high-quality protein and energy source for livestock feed.
Often times, our customers are focused on marketing the oil from this process, but spend less time on the meal. As this current trend in oil, gasoline and veg oil prices has reminded us, you shouldn’t put too much focus on one product. After all, in an ExPress ® soybean plant, the majority of the output, by weight, is always meal, not oil.
Insta-Pro International has a nutrition staff to help you optimize the quality of your unique ExPress ® meal. ExPress ® soy meal products, when processed properly, are superior to commodity-type protein meals, like solvent-extracted soybean meal (see here, here, and here). Therefore, they should be priced higher to reflect differences in nutritional composition, (including higher residual oil content), higher digestible amino acids and less water.
In conclusion, with market volatility comes the need for certainty and consistency from the processing plant. This can be found by correctly valuing what you produce the most of – the protein-containing meal. At Insta-Pro we don’t just sell pieces of machinery, our staff is dedicated to help you with all of your problems and concerns to help make you more successful.