Making pelleted animal feed

[canuckamuck]

Being quite isolated, we have to go a long way to town to get pelleted food for pigs, fish, and soon laying hens. Everybody else here has to do the same, or pay a high price at local shops. So we have been musing about making our own and possibly selling some pig food to the neighbors too.

However I know nothing about the costs or the effort required.

For those of you who are already doing this, can you give me some advice or point me to some good information?

[ozzydom]

The batching,mixing,extruding and drying equipment is expensive,if it were all that simple people like RBH who expends hundreds of thousands of baht per annum on food would be doing it.

Each animal,bird or fish requires a different formula

Issan Aussie had some pelletising equipment for sale so he could fill you in on the pro,s and cons.

[pigeonjake]

if you look on the pigs 101 thread a few pages back i think some one was making there own,

jake

[ericthai]

It is a science to get the mix correct. You cant have too much water and you cant have too little needs to be exact to create good pellets.

We produce pellets from a plant that is highly absorbent that we export to Japan and Australia. It took us about 1 month to figure out the correct mixture for our

process. Equipment depends on what you plan on producing and what the raw material is. For us we have a chipper that produces about a 20mm chip, then a milling machine to get down to a 8mm powder, a mixer, pellet machine and dryer. We can produce about 4000kgs per day, I dont think you would need this much production. The cost on this equipment was about $80,000USD However you could start out small, just get a cheap chipper for 80,000B and a cheap pellet machine between 60,000-100,000B Mix by hand and dry buy laying out in the sun.

However draw backs are rain days and labor intensive. When laying out in the sun to dry you need to rake it. We started this way. You need to put down a large tarp or lay on cement. Cement is best as it will be hot from the sun and help to dry faster. We also produce a feed for cattle same process. Main issue is getting raw material. We contract with farmer to grow for us. So you need to keep that in mind too. Our initial investment was high. We started out leasing land and planting but got way too much work for us. So we contract with farmers to grow in between rice crops. However this is not easy either. We have to provide the seeds on credit and fertilizer on credit then deduct what we owe them when the crop is harvested. So we have a large finical output for 4-5 months. Making pellets sounds easy but from start to finish it's allot of work.

If you have any questions PM me.

Edited February 25, 2014 by ericthai