Pro-Cal Turns Waste to Feed

Imagine trying to put peanut butter in a feed trough. That’s the situation chicken processors faced when trying to make a useful product from dissolved air flotation, or DAF, skimmings.

Previously, the waste fat skimmings — a byproduct of poultry processing — were “hard to handle.” They had to be mixed with other materials, such as soybean meal, if they were going to be used as feed for domestic animals such as chickens and cows.

Simmons Foods Inc. was generating 300,000 pounds of DAF skimmings every day from three of its processing plants combined (costing about $550,000 per year to haul off). So the company found a way to turn the fat into a free-flowing feed with the consistency of chocolate milk powder.

Companies have been trying to do it for 30 years, or at least that’s what one University of Arkansas professor said about Pro-Cal, the new product developed by the Siloam Springs company.

“[Pro-Cal] goes one step further in taking what has gone out in the water that we couldn’t capture, or handle very well, and turn it into a useful product,” said Park Waldroup, the UA’s Novus International Distinguished Professor.

In January, Simmons opened a $10 million, 125,000-SF commercial production plant in Southwest City, Mo., dedicated to making Pro-Cal.

Processing Program

Mark Simmons, chairman of Simmons Foods, said he sees the opportunity for three or four more plants in the future if other companies also supply the processing material.

“We have to make sure we prove the concept and work out all the kinks and bugs,” Simmons said. “No one has ever done this before.”

Besides the cost of the new plant, Simmons said the company probably spent an additional $1 million on research and development of Pro-Cal.

It took Simmons more than five years to reach commercial production. In 2001, the company bought the exclusive patent rights to the technology while it was in the patenting process from inventor John Lee of Regal Technologies LLC in Olathe, Kan.

Currently, the wastewater is pumped from poultry kill rooms to a treatment plant where the DAF skimmings are recovered. The blood, fat and protein material is then pumped or trucked to the Pro-Cal plant. It is blended, mixed and heated. From there, more water is extracted before the product goes into the dryer. The end product is a rust-colored powder.

In the drying process, the evaporation of moisture in the dryer creates odor-filled vapors that are sent to the thermal oxidizer. Those vapors are heated to 1,400 degrees, which creates steam and captures the heat to power the Pro-Cal plant. The oxidizer actually creates more steam than the plant uses, and some of the steam is sent to other plants on site.

It’s not part of the patented technology, but using a thermal oxidizer is uncommon in the United States, said John Haid, general manager of Pro-Cal. Most plants use water and chemicals to eliminate odors generated during processing. Using the oxidizer is still a more expensive means of producing power than a traditional generator, Haid said.

“The Pro-Cal process allows the protein in the blood to encapsulate the fat in the DAF skimmings,” Haid said.

Previously, Simmons added cooked blood from its slaughter operations to its feather meal. About six loads of DAF skimmings had to be hauled away every day from Simmons’ processing plants in Southwest City, Jay, Okla., and Siloam Springs. Those plants combined process 3 million broilers and 355,000 breeder hens per week, Haid said. The plant has the capacity to handle ten 50,000-pound loads of DAF per day.

If Simmons costs associated with land applying DAF skimmings were applied to the average weekly poultry slaughter rate of about 168 million birds nationwide (based on Watt Poultry USA 2005 data), it would mean a cost savings of about $588,000 per week or $30.6 million annually.

The material is also trucked in from the Jay and Siloam Springs plants to make Pro-Cal. Simmons plans on getting material from other poultry processing companies in the future, if those firms are interested. The plant is designed for the addition of another dryer, or in other words it could eventually handle 20 loads per day.

Haid said Simmons might eventually license the technology to other companies. If the technology is sold, Simmons will get a continuing royalty on sales of Pro-Cal as part of the licensing fee.

Simmons is currently producing about 350 to 400 tons of Pro-Cal per week, Haid said. The plant has the capacity to produce 17,000 tons per year, which could be doubled with an additional dryer. The majority of the product is fed internally to about 17 to 18 million of Simmons’ birds weekly. The balance is shipped to dairy operations of about 5,600 head of cattle in western Kansas.

Gastric Greats

Gene Woods, president of Pro-Cal, said Pro-Cal is valuable in a dairy cow’s diet because of its quality as a bypass fat and protein. The fat doesn’t get caught up in the first of the four stomachs of a cow, he said. It bypasses the first stomach and is processed in the lower digestive tract, which gives the cow the ability to use the nutrient without the negative consequence of affecting the delicate bacteria balance in the first stomach. Too much fat in the first stomach will upset the bacteria that help break down grass and other roughage in the cow’s diet and cause it to eat less and therefore produce less milk.

Greg Bethard, owner of G & R Dairy Consulting Inc. of Wytheville, Va., said Pro-Cal is a unique product because the fat and the protein are packaged together. The cow gets a bypass fat, which it can’t get from soybean meal alone, and a product such as blood meal doesn’t have to be added to the feed separately, he said. Bethard is consulting the dairy operators in western Kansas that are using Pro-Cal.

“In a dairy cow that produces a large amount of milk, it’s a real challenge to get enough nutrients in a cow’s system,” Haid said. “The reason a nutritionist feeds a bypass fat is to get more energy into the cow to produce a large amount of milk, maintain a better body condition to produce another calf to renew the cow’s milk cycle.”

A cow produces the most milk when she calves once each year, he said.

Tom Jenkins, professor of animal and veterinary sciences at Clemson University, said cows and chickens will utilize Pro-Cal differently.

“Chickens still need energy and protein, but they don’t need the bypass fat quality,” Jenkins said. “Chickens can use fat and they need energy, but bacteria balance isn’t an issue in a chicken’s stomach.” Chickens and pigs are both monogastric, or single stomach animals.

Jenkins conducted two Pro-Cal trials on dairy cattle about three years ago. He said it takes about four months to conduct a trial.

Pro-Cal contains a high level of the amino acid lysine, which all animals will use, Haid said.

“Pro-Cal is one of the few supplies for natural lysine,” Haid said.

Proteins are made up of different amino acids, he said. But one protein will have more amino acids than others. Fishmeal, blood meal, corn gluten meal and soybean meal are some of the feed supplements used to give domestic animals proteins that contain lysine.

Waldroup and the UA Poultry Science department conducted six trials using Pro-Cal. He said the product replaces other energy and protein sources in an animal’s diet.

“Basically, they are taking a waste product that has been a nuisance and making it a valuable feed ingredient,” Waldroup said.

Pro-Cal isn’t going to replace a large amount of an animal’s diet, as Waldroup calculated the Pro-Cal generated from processing could only account for one percent of a broiler’s diet. Haid said even if Simmons fed Pro-Cal to its entire poultry stock, it will still only account for less than two percent of the bird’s diet.

But not only is there value in reusing a product that was once thought of as waste, but the process generates a feed supplement that is 36 percent fat and 48 percent protein. Waldroup said the highest fat content he’d seen in other feed ingredients previous to Pro-Cal was about 10 to 12 percent.