Poultry Feed Mill Equipment

A feed production mill is a must have if you are planning to make your own poultry feeds at home or in a small industrial plant. Feed milling equipment consists of various components. These include the feed grinding machine, a feed mixing machine, the feed pellet machine, the feed pellet cooling machine as well as a feed pellet packing machine.

Apart from these core poultry feed mill equipment, there are also auxiliary feed mill equipment that make all this function together as a unit. These including the conveying machine or a system of conveyance belts, a control cabinet, dust collectors, storage bins, fire protection equipment and many others. It all depends on how well equipped and sophisticated you want your poultry feed milling plant to be.

For more information on how this entire system works during the feed processing, check out our post on the poultry feed production line that explains what happens in every component. If you are going to establish poultry feed production line or milling plant, you will have to purchase all these machine components and install them on your production floor with some technical assistance.

Feed Mill Equipment Basic Operations

The basis operations of poultry feed mill equipments includes the following processes:-

• Receiving the raw materials
• Grinding the raw materials
• Batching
• Mixing the raw materials
• Pelleting
• Cooling
• Sifting or Screening
• Packaging the processed poultry feed
• Warehousing the processes feed

Receiving the Raw Materials

The poultry feed mill is equipped to receive various kinds of raw materials. Depending on the design of the poultry mill, the plant line can receive either a truck or rail delivery and sometimes, it can receive both deliveries.

The various ingredients to be used in processing the poultry feed such as the grains, fats, fish meal, pre-mixes and molasses are delivered to the plant by trucks. The grains and soybean meal are generally delivered by rail.

The dry ingredients to be used in formulating the poultry feeds can be received in bags or in bulk. The liquid ingredients to be used in poultry feed formulation such as molasses and fat can be pumped directly into the storage tank in the feed mill line.

The bulk grain and other solid ingredients can be conveyed via a conveyor or bucket elevator to be cleaned or screen before being stored in the storage bins within the feed mill.

Grinding

The solid grains must be ground in the feed mill by the poultry feed grinder or the feed hammer mill. This is done before the feed is mixed with the other feed ingredients to be used in the poultry feed formulation.

Batching

During the feed formulation, the various ingredients being used to make the poultry feed must be weighed quantitatively, in batches. The quantity of the various ingredients that you will feed into the feed mill scale hopper is to be controlled from a central console. This can be done either automatically or manually with aim of ensuring that you feed in the correct ratio for each ingredient.

Mixing

The mixing is done by the feed mixer in the poultry feed mill. The feed mixing will uniformly mix all the individual ingredients being used in the poultry feed formulation. The mixing time will depend on the property of the feed ingredients being used as well as feed formulation for the particular poultry feed that you are making.

Pelleting

During the pelleting stage, the mixed/blended feed ingredients are fed into the pelleting machine in the production line. The pelleting process involves various stages. The mixture of feed ingredients goes into the pellet mill feeder. This will control the rate at which the feed ingredients mixture mixture will enter the feed pelleting equipment.

The next process at the pelleting stage involves the blending together of the dry mixed materials withs team in order to create a wet mesh. It this wet mash that is fed to the mill pelleting machine. It can be pushed here either through gravity or via a forced feeder system.

Inside the pelleting chamber, the hot and moist mash is forced through a pellet mash dye whereupon it is converted into pellets of the desired size and shapes.

Cooling and Sifting

The pelletized poultry feed are finally cool before packaging. The hot feed mixture is feed into the pellet cooling machine by gravity. The cooling is done in order to get durable and hard pellets. Once the pellets are cooled, they will flow into the screening machine where there is the scalping of the pelleted mash into the fines and mash.

Packing and Warehousing the Poultry Feed

The finished pellets are finally weighed, packaged and sealed. This can be done either manually or automatically. Finally, the packaged feed are warehoused ready for distribution to the market.

Maintaining the Feed Mill Equipment

The poultry feed mill should be maintained well and on a regular basis in order to improve its operational efficiency as well as the quality of the feed produced. Proper maintenance will also reduce the instances of feed contamination during processing.

There are various kinds of maintenance that you can perform on your poultry feed mill. These include the emergency maintenance, routine maintenance, the call-in maintenance as well as preventive maintenance.

The routine maintenance for your poultry feed mill is the scheduled maintenance that you carry out regularly based on a fixed routine. Typical routine maintenance work includes activities such as the lubrication of the bearings, replacing the hammer mill screens, replacing the worn out parts of the poultry feed mill equipment or checking the oil levels in the poultry feed mill gear boxes.

With emergency maintenance work, you will be reacting sudden unplanned breakdowns in the machinery. This must be done immediately in order to get the machine running on schedule.

Call-in maintenance also comes into play in an emergency situation. In this case, the people to do the maintenance are not on site and must be called from outside.

Preventive maintenance for the poultry feed mill machine involves making certain adjustments and carrying out inspections and repairs on the equipment. This involves activities such as repairing the worn out parts before they fail based on observation in order to forestall further damage and ensure the feed mill machine is working smoothly.

The Importance of Poultry Feed Mill?

As the world’s population grows by the year, so does the demand for food. To accommodate these demands, a wide range of nutritious foods are marketed in markets around the world. Chicken is one of the world’s most popular meats.

It is used in a variety of dishes. The global demand for nutritious chicken meat and eggs continues to rise. Poultry feed production has also expanded in order to provide healthy poultry feed to chickens, with poultry feed accounting for 47 percent of total feed produced globally.

Because a single feed cannot provide all of the nutritional needs of the birds, a range of poultry feeds (mash feed, crumble feed, pellet feed) are manufactured for various purposes.

The poultry feed mill plant manufactures and distributes food for chickens, geese, ducks, and other domestic birds. Forage, such as grains, yard debris, and domestic garbage, was once the most prevalent poultry feed.

Farmers became aware of the fact that those forages were insufficient to provide necessary nutrition to their flocks as the farming sector grew.

With this awareness came an increase in the demand for nutritious food products, and more and more animal feed mill plants began to use contemporary technical machines and equipment to create tonnes of these items and begin selling them to farmers.

During a time when people are consuming an increasing amount of chicken goods, the production of poultry feed pellets is a very profitable company.

This company has since evolved from a small scale to a huge scale in several countries that not only meet their own needs with the feed generated, but also export it to adjacent countries.

The United States, China, the Philippines, Thailand, and a few South American countries have constructed large-scale chicken feed production plants.