Fish Feed Plant Background & Necessity
Along with the development of aquaculture, aquafeed industry has also made a quite fast progress, especially in virtue of continue advancement of breeding technology, the culturing mode has turned into intensive cultivation from extensive fish farming, which provides vast space for fish feed production. In line with the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) report, the per capita fish consumption of human beings has exceeded beef consumption while farmed fish has surpassed wild caught. It is well known that fish feed plays a leading role in global aquaculture and fish farming field, making sure safe, abundant and affordable fish proteins, but meanwhile, the cost of aquatic feed is so high that affecting sustainable development of aquaculture industry. Therefore, it is necessary, economic and practical for fish farmers or feed plants to establish their own fish feed production line rather than buying or importing feed from elsewhere.
Fish Feed Plant Aim & Significance
Feed is the first and foremost factor that affects the growth of aquatic animals. With the advantages of low feed coefficient, low incidence of fish disease and resistance to transport, high quality feed is conducive to fish fast growth and aquatic products quality and safety. Compared with other feed manufacturing technologies, extruded processing technique of fish feed plant has unparalleted superiority in making fish feed pellets. For instance, extruded feed pellet is easy to digest and absorb, which can promote the digestive utilization ratio of feed; it has good stability in water for long time with less pollution to water and environment, avoiding scattering before ingestion and greatly reduce the loss of nutrient substance and the waste of fish feed. All in all, extruded fish feeds produced by our fish feed production line are environment-friendly superior quality fodder with low pollution, little waste, high efficiency and high conversion rate, becoming an inevitable trend of aquaculture feed industry. 
What’s more, fish feed plant is able to achieve the availability of feed ingredient at low prices in required quantity and control the key link – fish feed to get more profits and ensure food quality safety.
Fish Feed Market Demand
According to the diverse eating habits of different type fishes, feed should have properties – floating, slow floating or sinking, and keep stability in water for certain time so as to leave enough ingesting time for fish. Fortunately, our fish feed plant can make aquatic feed with the above characteristics, meeting the environmental protection and high efficiency requirements of feed in aquaculture. In general, it is local fish farmers that would be main potential target markets if establishing fish feed production line.
Fish Feed Plant Production Process
Generally speaking, fish feed production process flow has several main steps, including procurement of feed ingredients, raw materials grinding, mixing, extruding, drying and automatic weighing and packaging, in tune with scientific and nutrient aquatic feed formulation.
◇Acquisition of feed ingredients
According to nutritional requirement for fish feed, the main components of feed ingredients should contain protein, lipids, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals. Most of raw materials can be procured locally, for example, in Nigeria, there are many available feed ingredients considered as potential materials for fish feed, including rice bran, maize, wheat bran, soybean cake, peanut dregs, dry grass powder and so on. When choosing fish feed ingredients, there is one point that should be kept in mind: quality is the most important point, so do not accept unsatisfactory batches of ingredients even if offered at low cost due to bad ingredients may cause harmful effect on fish growth.
◇Grinding
Raw materials need to be crushed for producing fish feed, aiming to get materials suitable for making high quality feed and appropriate to digest for aquatic animals. To be specific, crushing can add the exposed surface area of raw materials and make it easier to digest. Moreover, it can improve the uniformity of mixing, which is especially important for those fish with little feed intake. Here, we provide a hammer grinding machine – fish feed hammer mill for processing feed stuffs of various granularity into small pieces. And here is the working principle of this machine: hammer hit breaks raw materials in the crushing chamber with high-speed rotation; then the broken materials move with continuous friction and crash against the hammer, toothed plate and sieve for crushing.
◇Mixing
It is the efficient mixing process that is the key to high quality fish feed production. Some materials with smaller particle size has bad fluidity, so they need to be mixed for longer time for even mixture. Total blending time is such crucial and is affected by the composition of fish feed formula. Adopting our fish feed mixer, also called ribbon blender can mix various fluid and thick, pasty and granular materials. With excellent design and easy operation, it is made of high quality stainless steel, contributing to its wear-resistant strength and long lifespan.
◇Extruding
In the process of extruding, the physical and chemical property of materials would change sharply (mainly starch dextrinization and protein denaturation) under the stewing with high temperature, high pressure and high humidity. After extruded from die hole, the pressure would plunge in a moment, making the moisture in feed turning into gas state from liquid state, and emitting from feed would cause pellets extrusion and then become so-called extruded fish feed. This kind of aquafeed has fine palatability and high degree of starch pasting, which makes it easy to digest, lowering the waste and improving the utilization of fish feed. Equipped with a boiler, wet type fish feed extruder can provide hot steam continuously and produce feed pellets with different sizes from 0.9mm to 15mm for various fishes. In virtue of its high production capacity and good quality, it has been widely praised among medium- and large-scale feed plants or fish farm.
◇Drying
Pellets need to be dried after extruding so as to remove the redundant water content by fish feed dryer via drying process technology. With this drying machine, materials can enter the channel through conveyor belt and be dried via hot air, after that, the temperature would be lowered quickly to ambient and the moisture would be decreased to around 8% for convenient storage.
◇Automatic Weighing & Packaging
The dried fish feed pellets should be automatically weighed and packed in bags with machine, especially for large-capacity feed production plant. With high accuracy, fast speed, automatic weighing and packing function and excellent operating performance, the cost-efficient industrial automated packing machine from us can protect fish feed from being contaminated when moving or transporting. In a word, this machine is very useful to add productivity and lower labor intensity, suitable for bagging materials, such as fish feed pellets, seeds, grains, organic fertilizer and the like.
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