When their plans to extrude ground-up hens laid an egg, the folks at Oleet Processing set their sights on a different kind of feed supplement – one that has taken flight.
The Regina processing company is using a combination of oilseeds and pulse crops to make a high-protein, easily digestible “energy bar” for animals.
What makes their feed supplements unique is the company’s extrusion process, which applies intense pressure to the crops, rupturing the oilseeds’ cells.
“It kills all the pathogens,” said Elan Ange, Oleet’s business development officer.
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“It kills all the undigestible things.”
To use technical lingo, the extrusion process destroys glucosinolates and myrosinase in canola and the trypsin inhibitor, hemaglutinin, saponins and tannins in peas.
Work on the oilseed and pulse mixtures began in earnest about four years ago in conjunction with Vern Racz of the University of Saskatchewan’s Prairie Feed Resource Centre, after the original idea to extrude ground-up spent hens and soybean meal flopped.
Ange said they struggled to find a way to make the hen and soybean supplement work, but eventually shelved the project.
“It was a lot of trial and error and by the time we finally figured out how to stabilize the meal so that it didn’t stink, ExtraPro was already doing well.”
ExtraPro is the company’s canola supplement. Ange said it’s made by combining the oilseed with peas and beans and extruding the three crops into a “flowable, floury” product that feed mills use to make poultry and hog feed.
LinPro, another recently developed product by Oleet, is an “immuno stimulant” primarily used in sow diets. It is made the same way as ExtraPro, but uses flax instead of canola.
More than half the oil in flax seed is the essential omega-3 fatty acid type, which provides health benefits for the animals that eat the supplement and the humans that eat the animals. The company claims that feeding the flax supplement to hogs and poultry improves the animals’ immune systems and produces omega-3 enriched eggs and meat.
Both supplements can also be fed to dairy cattle, but there is a limit to how much can be fed to cows because of the high oil content.
Results from a University of Saskatchewan trial also indicate that feeding high doses of LinPro to broiler chickens can cause a small depression in growth and feed efficiency.
Sales of ExtraPro have been brisk and they are picking up for LinPro as well. Combined, Oleet sells about 2,300 tonnes a month to feed mills.
Part of the appeal is how easily the supplements can be added to rations.
“They put it in a bin and just mix it like it’s wheat or whatever else they’re putting in,” Ange said.
ExtraPro costs $285-$300 per tonne, and LinPro $395-$415 per tonne.
Oleet buys about 1,200 tonnes of oilseeds and 1,200 tonnes of pulses a month from western Canadian farmers, brokers, processors and elevators.
“We’re taking off-grade product – feed quality, heated and green,” Ange said. “This extrusion process can use that type of product.”
Racz said the company is the largest user of off-grade canola in North America.
“In years like this, where we have a lot of off-grade seed because of too much greens, here’s a company that is taking this material and giving producers value.”
Ange said the Regina plant has been operating at about three-quarters of capacity this year, and the future is beginning to smell more like roses than rotting hen flesh.
“If things keep going as well as they are, we have plans to build another one,” she said.
