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Ridgway, IL | we haven't installed a mixer, and have decided not to at the farm. For many of the same reasons chadincolo states above. If you are planning to sell blended feed, it needs to be sighted like a stand alone business with good access to highways and utilities.
My family operates a business of originating and freighting by products for feed mills and blend plants, along with farms that have tmr mixers. We get to see a wide range of facilities on a regular basis, and kind of get a sense of the limitations some of the lower investment facilities have and how that can translate into reduced margin by way of increased cost of ingredients, higher shrink, lower tonnage produced etc.
I see several 3-7 bay blending operations, batched by loader, into a mixer with a scale under it loaded directly onto delivery truck of some kind. Most probably handle 2-5,000 ton a year. When you go to the plant using technology to batch that in a day, with not very many more staff, certainly lower stress.. kind of makes you wonder. There are so many layers of value adding in feed processing, I think if you are just blending 3 ingredients to make creep feed... the 10-20/ton margin you can maybe charge probably doesn't leave much at the end of the year for the time and effort you put into it.
I visited a plant this week that was making 14,000 bags of feed a day with 3 guys. 1 receiving and documenting. 1 maintaining mill function. and 1 loading trucks. Rest was automated. Im sure they have other staff at different times of day/week but that was a pretty efficient operation. Their feed didn't even have their name on the bag, they did branded production runs for large retailers.
Thats probably the biggest thing I've observed.. feed origination is a huge job, mixing/blending/processing is a huge job, formulating is a big job, marketing and sales is a big job, logistics is a big job, accounting is a big job, retailing is a huge job. A stand alone operation to do all those things is really complex, an operation trying to do all those jobs with just a few people is probably leaving considerable money on the table or just not doing a lot of volume. I was regularly visiting a place that would batch 8-900 ton a day with skid steers. was a 200+ foot long building with at least a dozen commodities. Probably 15+ men working to do that, feed a foot deep on the floor of the barn, place wasn't a nice place to work. Did they make money? I couldn't say. Could they partner with others to build a state of the art mill with automation and reduce their cost per ton? Absolutely yes.
Its like a lot of things in agriculture I would say... if you are capable of originating, mixing, blending, freighting, marketing, and accounting for 5,000 ton a year and making 20/ton... you can prob go get a corporate job for 2x as much, work under 60 hrs a week and have a month of vacation a year. Plus not carry the stress. | |
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Starting a Custom Feed Mixing Business
