New machine provides poultry food for breeders
Sri Wahyuni, The Jakarta Post, Yogyakarta
Soon, small- and middle-scale poultry breeders will be able to provide a cheap poultry food supply of their own.
Three researchers from Gadjah Mada University (UGM) are currently in the final stages of creating a new machine that will enable the breeders to provide a poultry food supply. And with additional research funds of Rp 100 million they would be ready to mass produce the machines within a year.
"We completed the laboratory test last month. We need the additional funds to conduct a production test, which mainly consists of engineering work, to make the machine ready for commercial mass production," said research leader Supranto of the UGM's School of Chemical Engineering.
Adopting heat pump technology, the machine, according to Supranto, could produce 25 kilograms of ready-to-feed poultry food in an hour either in the form of powder or pellet, depending on the maker's preference.
Calculations on paper, he said, showed the machine could produce poultry food 60 percent to 70 percent cheaper than the market price. "If you make poultry food of the same composition to the one offered on the market," said Supranto.
He said that with the machine, poultry breeders would have the freedom to decide the composition of the poultry food according to their own needs. It means the machine would also be able to produce much cheaper poultry food by reducing particular components from the planned food's composition, or increase quality by adding other ingredients.
"That is another advantage of using the device to produce poultry food," said Supranto, who is conducting the research with his colleagues Suhardi of UGM's School of Agricultural Technology and Kusnanto of UGM's Center for Energy Studies.
The first stage of the research which was started in 2000, was completed with financial support from Boma Bisma Indra, a state- owned company producing agricultural appliances based in East Java. But it gave up its support of the next stages due to financial problems.
The machine, about six-meters long and between 1.6-meters and 1.2-meters high, consists of three main parts: a mill, a rotary drier or drum drier, and a drying air supplier directly connected to the rotary drier. Some 770 watts of electricity is needed to make the device work.
To make poultry food, one just pours mixed raw materials into the mill. The ingredients then come out of the mill in the form of either paste or pellets, according to the preferred result, and passes directly into the rotary drier. After about an hour, you would find them coming out of the drier as ready-to-use powder or pellets.
"I was in fact inspired by a British made appliance used to distillate ethanol, which I saw in Manchester in 1987 while I was finishing my post graduate studies at Salford University there," he said.
According to Supranto, of the three main parts of the machine, the most complicated component was the drying air supplier that had the task of supplying dry air to the rotary drier connected next to it. This particular part of the newly invented machine had adopted the heat-pump technology used in the ethanol distillator appliance that Supranto saw in England.
"What makes it complicated is that it has to be able to maintain the temperature of the drying air between 50 to 80 degrees Celsius. It has to be that way to prevent the poultry food losing too much protein content and requires a longer time for the drying process," Supranto said.
For this particular reason, the drying air supplier's construction process and research were entirely conducted inside the laboratory of the UGM's School of Chemical Engineering. While handymen owning a technical workshop on Jl. Kaliurang KM 17 helped the research team make the other two parts.
"But we have so far succeeded in meeting with the requirement (of maintaining the drying air temperature between 50-80 degree Celsius) that we are ready to step forward to the next stages," Supranto said.
"I therefore invite any interested parties to support the research, to which we will present the rights for the machine's commercial mass production," he added.
Based on the research, the cost of making a single set of the device was between Rp 9 million and Rp 15 million. However, if it was mass produced the costs would halve.
And the interesting factor was, according to the researchers' calculations, small- and middle-scale poultry breeders could collectively own the machine, sharing it to make the business more economical while maintaining a good poultry food supply.