Soyabean Animal Feed

We also specialise in Top Quality Animal feeds e.g. Bulk Soya Cake, Sunflower Cake and B-Grade Maize Grits.

Soybean meal is the most important protein in South Africa and Africa, in terms of feeding animals. Today soybean meal makes up two-thirds of the total world output of protein feedstuffs for animal feed. It has completely overtaken any other feeding protein and has become the standard with which other proteins are compared.

Once soybean oil has been processed, soybean meal is the by-product of the extraction process. It is because of its high protein content that soybean meal is classified as a good quality animal feed. Soybean meal is divided into 2 categories; High-protein and conventional. With the high-protein meal, there is 47-49% protein content and 3% fibre while with conventional soybean meal the protein content is between 43-44% and the hulls.

Suppliers stick to certain specifications during the production of soybean meal and so they use 1 of 3 main ways to extract soybean for oil and soybean meal for cattle feed. The most commonly used method to extract the oil and produce the soybean meal is solvent extraction. Each process produces soya bean animal feed.

The two processes in the production of soybean meal as high protein bulk livestock feed

The solvent extraction process is one of the more common methods in the production of soybean meal. With this process, the soybeans are cracked, heated, flaked and perhaps dehulled and then passed through an expander which will ease the removal of oil by the solvent which is usually hexane. When a solvent is used, the use of an expander can reduce the need for a larger quantity of the solvent. Flakes are then dried a bit more before being toasted and then ground down into animal feed. Prior to the extraction process, soybeans can be dehulled and the hulls can be readded to the flakes at the end of the extraction process. When the hulls are not readded, the protein makeup of the animal feed can be changed with the total protein composition being 48% and the oil composition being 1.5%. The result of the process, when done like this, is a high protein soybean animal feed.

In the mechanical process (the oldest one), the soybeans are cracked, dried, heated (steamed) and fed to a mechanical press (screw press), then the resulting flakes are dried and ground. The heat generated by the friction of the screw press destroys the anti-nutritional factors in raw soybeans. These specialised meals have higher levels of residual oil (energy), lower protein contents, greater rumen by-pass values, and they are more palatable than other oilseed meals. They are valuable in dairy rations to balance the amino acids supplied by alfalfa forage, or corn-based by-products

Extruding/expelling is a variation of mechanical extraction. Soybean flakes are fed to a dry extruder and do not require steaming. After dry extrusion, the meats are passed through a screw press to extract the oil. This process can be done at small scale in farm facilities and are much appreciated for labelled non-GMO soybean, for organic farming.

Suppliers process approximately 195,000 tonnes of soya beans to meet the requirements in South Africa and various regions of Africa. In South Africa, the Limpopo region relies mainly on soya bean meal as a protein based alternative. The biggest manufactures of soya meal animal feed are based in Gauteng.