Event: First Global Milling Conference

Improving the efficiencies of feedmills

There are five key areas where feedmills in India and other developing countries should concentrate to make dramatic savings in the cost of processing and either improve profitability or become more competitive in the marketplace.

That’s the message Novus Animal Nutrition (India) Ltd’s Director for South Asia, Dr Vaibhav Nagpal, had for the 80-plus delegates attending the 1^st Global Milling Conference in Chennai, India, on its first day. He told delegates, “We cannot improve what we can not control. We cannot control what we can not measure. We cannot measure what we cannot define.”

Dr Vaibhav Nagpal, Director – South Asia & South East Asia Pacific for Novus Inc

Therefore, feed manufactures had to first define a plan in order to gain control over their costs and avoid over formulating to compensate for nutrient inconsistencies.

He provided examples of where simply knowingly over formulating soybean meal in a diet by 0.2 percent would cost a reasonably-sized company as much as US$100,000 per year.

Producing the wrong particle size also has significant consequences for costs in the grinding process and subsequent conditioning times and pellet quality. He provided data on ideal particle sizes that would optimise throughput at the press and save energy. The impact on costs were also to be seen in the growth rate of broilers further down the line.

In much the same way there were costs to be saved in the provision of steam to the pellet press. To dry or inconsistent steam supplied to the pellet press would see throughputs reduced and energy costs rise.

Dr Nagpal also highlighted the value of detecting and eliminating salmonella from the production cycle and suggested cost-effective ways of ‘cleaning’ production lines.

Finally, he mentioned HACCP and the need for overall mill hygiene.

The 1^st Global Milling Conference attracted both feed millers and flour millers to Chennai for the first of a two-day meeting that continues tomorrow, Saturday February 9, 2013.

A normal map of the world and a view of the world based on land allocated on a square metre per head of population. As a result Asia would account for 56 percent of the world’s land mass