The Interview | Christian Rabe, Head of Applied Feed Technology, Evonik, Germany

Christian Rabe, Head of Applied Feed Technology, Evonik, Germany 

Christian Rabe started his education at the Technical University (TU) in Munich with a Bachelor of Bio-Process Technology, followed by a Master of Process Technology at the TU Braunschweig. In 2010, he started working on process development for the production of different feed additives at Evonik.

Mr Rabe possesses more than 10 years of practical experience with process technology and application of feed additives in different functions within Evonik. During his career he has also been involved with quality assurance and new product development for feed additives.

He has also worked on starting up new production sites for feed additives and implementing equipment at customer sites to handle these feed additives all over the world. To achieve this, he tries to get as many as possible different insights into the feed industry and then look at it from different angles.

  

Looking back at your life, which events in particular lead you into a career in the feed sector? 

At university I learned a lot about producing chemical or biotechnological substances in an optimum way to reduce the required resources. However, the application of these products often leads to an increased demand for resources.

Starting my career at Evonik, I was involved in the production of feed additives. Very early on, I got insights into the application of these products. I was fascinated by the beneficial effect you can achieve with feed additives on animal welfare and the ecological footprint. These effects are based on scientific research.

Because of the product value of these feed additives, I wanted to go deeper into their application. After getting further insights into the feed industry, including quality assurance and new product development, I really focused on feed mill production and still try to optimise this process as much as I can.   

 Where do you still see as being the highest optimisation potential in a modern feed mill, what would you say are the relevant core process steps?

 

For this question you need to distinguish between two important aspects. First, are you finding the same amount of all components in the final feed as you added? So, do you have a sufficient recovery rate? This is highly influenced by the dosing accuracy.

And second, is the added component always the same in each small feed portion? So, do you have a sufficient homogeneity? This is highly influenced by the mixing homogeneity.

To answer these two questions, you need to look deeper into the dosing and mixing process. Of course, all process steps during feed production will influence the final feed quality but mixing and dosing still have a high optimisation potential if you compare theoretical and practical data.

For both process steps, the performance is much higher in theory than in practice. We have measured this using the Evonik long term test in commercial feed mills all over the world. And these process steps can be improved easily by changing some parameters.

While the equipment parameters are fixed by the available equipment, the physical product and process parameters can be influenced by, for example, using dry or liquid ingredients. So, at this point you can directly improve mixing homogeneity and dosing accuracy by using more dry ingredients.

 

What would you say is the influence of feed quality for the ensuing value chain? 

A certain amount of essential feed additives is needed for every animal to achieve uniform performance. Different available scientific publications demonstrate what will happen if essential feed additives are not well distributed in the final feed; you will not achieve a uniform body weight or animal performance in the animals.

Therefore, the production of the final feed with the right quality is one essential piece of the puzzle to achieve sustainable meat production. Without having optimised feed production, you will use too many resources and, therefore, will lose money during meat production.

 

Do you see any emerging trends for feed production in modern feed mills? 

In future feed mill operations will be more and more automised and more and more data will be created during production. This will help to improve the overall feed production process. Connecting the different process steps and adapting each one because of slight changes to others will help you to run the feed production in an optimum way all the time.

A very interesting example is online analytics. If you are able to react to fluctuations in raw material quality on a single batch level, you can reduce all the safety margins you have added to get a constant feed quality.

Connecting online analytics with your dosing equipment will allow you to get this benefit, and this technique is already available. But one further step is to get data from animal performance directly and also use these data for feed production. So, you will connect your animal performance with your feed mill production and get your dedicated final feed. 

 

How do we check feed quality and if required, how can it be improved? 

One important point of feed quality mentioned above, is that all added ingredients need to be homogeneously mixed and added in the right amount. Of course, lots of other process steps next to dosing and mixing are important for achieving a sufficient feed quality.

But there is an easy way to check your mixing and dosing performance by just measuring a so-called mixing profile. There are several service providers available to do this, Evonik can check your dosing and mixing performance by measuring the content of different amino acids in the final feed, for example.

You just take ten samples from one mixing batch during a running operation. That is all. Afterwards you know if you need to improve your mixing and dosing process or not.

There are lots of factors influencing the mixing homogeneity and dosing accuracy you can check. These include the physical product properties, the maintenance status of the equipment, the set of process parameters, the amount of added liquids, the type of raw materials, the way of proportioning the products and the type of equipment.

For this list I do not want to claim completeness, but optimisation of all of these parameters can increase mixing homogeneity and dosing accuracy, therefore improving feed quality.

 

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