Move Towards Order with High-Shear Dry Extrusion
In today’s feed and food world, with differing ingredients due to ever-changing raw material conditions, and rapidly-evolving consumer trends, it may be regularly chaotic for you during development, production, and sales of products.
After all, you’re trying to meet product specifications and predict how a particular diet formulation will affect animal performance goals. If these goals are missed, your customers will let you know about it. And even though it may seem straight forward, like with most things, there’s a lot more gray than black and white.
We periodically give you tips for further enhancing your formulation strategies (see here for an article list). Rather than just relying on a least-cost formulation, it’s important to understand as much of the complexity as possible and use this knowledge to minimize as much of the uncertainty as you can.
For example, there is a tendency to put ingredients in neat little boxes of classification even though this approach is simple and flawed. If you’ve read our blog much at all, you’ll know that the method of choice for processing raw soybeans into meal and oil affects the quality and feeding values (and by extension, economic values) of these ingredients. This concept encompasses nearly all ingredients, even “commodities” such as corn.
Natural variation, such as crop growing conditions, affects this to a large degree. For example, we’ve written about how cereal grains can contain high levels of toxins that diminish animal performance. This is especially important during early growth phases when feed intake is limited, and animals have immature digestive systems.
It’s important to be humble enough to admit that many unknowns exist, and that it’s only possible to accurately measure some things. The best we can hope to do is to insert as much control as we can and build a solid foundation to rest upon – you can always fall back to this point in your performance and build in risk mitigation this way. Practically, this means having some high-quality, predictable, nutrient-rich ingredients as the backbone of a formulation.
The high-shear dry extruder can help you make these ingredients. With well-defined, easily-controlled processing conditions inside the extruder barrel, predictable ingredients can be made. Most notable in this category are high-shear, dry extruded whole soybeans (extruded full-fat) and dry extruded ExPress® soy meals. With highly-digestible amino acids and ample residual oil for energy, either of these ingredients can make up the core of a solid diet formulation.
Ask us about using high-shear dry extrusion to add some order into your formulation program.
