As one of the fastest growing food processing industry in the world, aquaculture has provided more than half of all aquatic products for human consumption. The rapid and healthy development of aquaculture industry can hardly do without the support of artificial breeding technology, knowledge of nutritional requirement to aquatic animals, aquafeed processing technology, fish feed production line and so on. Over the past years, the technique of fish feed production has proceeded rapidly and most aquaculture farmers are fond of using floating extruded pellet to feed their fish because floating feed makes it easier for them to observe fish intake and estimate feeding amount. 

The nutritional needs of fish for feed have their own characteristics. For example, fish can make full use of protein and fat in feed, but it can not make good use of carbohydrates, and it is difficult to digest cellulose, so fish has different nutritional requirements becase of its different feeding habits. The food of fish is different in different nutritional needs. Therefore, a rational feed formula should be formulated because of the difference between fish and fish. Only when the nutrients in the feed are in accordance with the needs of the fish can the absorption rate be increased and the feed coefficient be reduced. This means that feed coefficient is largely determined by the rationality of feed formulation.

Compared with other animal feed, fish feed has higher requirements in respect of feed nutrition and physical characteristics (including feed pellet shape, size, density, stability in water and so on), therefore, it is the appropriate feed processing technology and fish food making machines that plays a key role in producing healthy and nutrient aqua feed according to customers specific requirements. fish-feed-production-lineAs the leading fish feed machines and production line manufacturer, we can provide aquafeed processing equipment from raw material processing to finished feed bagging.

How to produce commercial fish feed pellet ?

Feed crusher machine
In general, there are three types crushing technologies, including collocation after grinding raw materials, grinding after ingredients mixing, and combination of the two. With the purpose of producing high quality aquafeed meeting the growing demand of aquatic life, it is desinging the crushing procedure of aquaculture feed that becomes the priority among priorities. The common crushing equipment contain fish feed hammer mill and droplet fish feed crusher. Usually, the former is used for rough grinding, which needs to add sieve during crushing process so as to return coarse grain for further milling. While the latter is always applied for fine grinding of cellulose materials, high-moisture materials, and granular materials like corn, grains, broomcorn and so forth, all of which make droplet fish feed crusher become incomparable machine for aquafeed production. All in all, the choice of crushing technique and crushing equipment should depend on the analysis of aquatic animal species, the analysis of feedstuff features and types, and the analysis of specified requirement of aquafeed quality.

Feed mixer machine
Mixing technique is very worthwhile to be concerned in the manufacturing process of aquatic feed. Because the daily food consumption of most aquatic animals is little, it is very necessary to make high quality mixing feed with uniform nutritional ingredient so as to ensure fish can get complete nutrient from daily ingestion. The mixing uniformity is affected by several factors, including raw materials feature, mixing time and blending equipment.

With the helical ribbon structure, our fish feed mixer, according with the GMP standard, is able to blend aquafeed raw materials with high productivity. Briefly, the use of mixing technology and equipment should consider the following points: choose high cost-performance mixing machine; some raw materials should be crushed first before mixing while some should be mixed and classified before grinding; when processed in the equipment, the water content of crushed raw materials with granular shape would be decreased along with the constant rising of heat.

Fish feed extruder machine
As a deep processing step in feed processing, the pelleting processing technology design and the choice of related machines are important factors affecting the quality of aquatic feed, including tempering and extruding technology. Tempering refers to the process of heat-moisture treatment to feedstuff for gelatinization, which can promote the digestibility of protein in feed, improve the water tolerance and stability, and kill the pathogenic bacteria without water pollution.

Currently, using extruding methods to produce various aquafeed has been promoted rapidly all over the world because fish feed made by extruding equipment has unique advantages , such as fine palatability, good stablility in water, easy digestion and so on. dry Type Fish Feed MachineGenerally, there are two types aquafeed extrusion machines, including dry type fish feed extruder and wet type fish feed extruder, which can be adopted to produce floating, sinking and slow-sinking aquatic feed to meet the ingestion requirements of diverse aqua animals. When choosing dry or wet type extruder, it is necessary to consider the water content of feed raw materials because the biggest difference between the two machines is that the wet one is equipped with a boiler for adding water or steam in the production processing.

Drying/Cooling Technology and Equipment
For easy storage, it is indispensable to dry or cool aquafeed after pelleting and extruding.  there is a multilayer mesh belt dryer that is specially designed for drying feed pellets. With circulation fan, heating device, fresh air suction and exhaust discharging system, this drying machine can be used to transfer pellets into chamber for heating so as to reduce water content of feed and lower temperature. Before finished, aquafeed pellets should be cooled after drying.

Based on counter flow cooling theory, our  fish feed cooler is able to cool the pellets completely and evenly, reducing pellets temperature from about 85 Celsius down to about 5 Celsius above surrounding temperature, and lowering pellets water content from nearly eighteen percents to about thirteen percents. In a word, suitable drying/cooling processing can make fish feed easier to store and transport, which makes it be considerable link in the feed production.