how to make alfalfa pellets
What is alfalfa pellets
Alfalfa is known as the king of the grazing grass, it features high yield, good quality and rich nutrition. Alfalfa contains a lot of crude protein, carbohydrate and vitamin B, C and E. Alfalfa is not only a kind of fodder for livestock including cattle and sheep, but also an ancient food for people. Most of the livestock likes eating alfalfa. As the commodity economy developing, the alfalfa industry grows fast. Now, the plant area of alfalfa is extended.
Alfalfa pellets is a type of fodder made of alfalfa. After the alfalfa is dried out, they can be made into pellets by a pellet mill. The alfalfa pellets have a high protein content. It can help to reduce the dose of concentrated feed. And the alfalfa pellets are more convenient for livestock feeding, installing and transporting than the fresh alfalfa.
How to dry the alfalfa
The alfalfa pellets are made of died alfalfa, or we can call it alfalfa hay. The pellets are usually 5-19mm diameter and 13-25mm length cylinders. The density of per unit alfalfa pellets is about 1120kg/m3. To improve the quality of the alfalfa pellets, the drying process can be very important. Before the alfalfa is put into the dryer, make sure there are enough materials, and the conveyer will convey the alfalfa into the dryer.
The classic way to process fresh alfalfa is that putting the alfalfa into the drum dryer, adjust the temperature to 200-900 degrees centigrade and wait for about 3 minutes, the alfalfa will be alright for making alfalfa pellets. The temperature of the drum dryer should be decided according to degree of alfalfa wilting. The raw alfalfa that we put into the drum dryer, can has a moisture of 45-75%. When the day is rainy, the moisture will be higher. The moisture of the processed alfalfa will be between 7% to 9%.
How to make alfalfa pellets
To process large scale alfalfa pellets, you may need a fodder pellet mill line, it is pretty similar with the wood pellet mill line, only we don't need the wood chipper. Because of the soft texture of the dried alfalfa, the hammer mill is enough to grind the raw materials. So the whole process can be divided to grinding, drying, pelletizing. It is much more easy than to process the wood pellets.
But if you just want to make pellets for home use, the drum dryer and the large scale pellet mill will be not necessary. A die-turned or a roller turned small pellet mill can make the pellets perfectly. We just need to adjust the moisture, grind them, the put into the small pellet mill.
Generally speaking, the wood pellet mill can process the feed pellets smoothly, but the fodder pellet mill can not process the hard raw materials like log, bark, straw etc. So there are some of our products I want to recommend, the small wood pellet mill and the hammer mill, if you have interest, please check out our airflow dryer. As I mentioned above, the drying process is important for making quality alfalfa pellets. The airflow dryer is small and efficient, can exactly match the clients who want to make alfalfa pellets in a small scale.
GEMCO offers quality and reliable pellet equipment. And we also provide free consultation. If you have any thing to know about us or our pellet mill machine, please feel free to contact us. We are happy to receive your messages, no matter it is about quotations, problems or suggestions, we will give you a satisfactory replay ASAP.
