How Can I Deal with High Ingredients Cost?
As we all know, feed cost constitutes about 65-70% of the total production cost for poultry, swine, and aquatic feed.
Many producers in the world are experiencing a steady and dramatic increase in commodity prices.
In the USA for example, corn costs increased by 92% in the year 2011 compared with the year before. Soybean meal prices increased by about 30% compared with the year 2010.
A producer faces the option of finding alternative ingredients that are cost effective to partially replace corn and soybean meal and achieve the production and profit goals necessary to stay in business.
The other alternative is accepting less efficient production goals, or getting out of business. As the efficiency of producing meat & eggs increases, more by-products are produced that need to be disposed of.
In the meantime, stringent regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency leads to less options for disposal of those by-products. In general, there are limits and costly disposal options. They include:
- Land fill application
- Burial
- Incineration
- Composting
- Cooking or rendering
- Extrusion
Although extrusion is a relatively new application for rendering by-products, it’s successful in many countries especially Russia where ingredient costs are high.
Examples of what can be extruded:
Spent hens, farm mortalities, manure or litter, feathers, hatchery waste, fish waste, blood and offal, mechanically deboned residue eggshells, restaurant waste and other food waste.
Co-extruding such by-products with a local ingredient of choice such as corn, wheat, soybean meal, wheat middlings or peas as an example can provide:
- An avenue of creating valuable and unique ingredients for livestock, poultry and fish.
- A reduction in the feed cost.
- A solution to an environmental liability.
- An extra steam of income.
Want to see it for yourself? Click here to see a plant processing swine by-products into high quality feed ingredients.
