Liquid supplement plant

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33774, 21 February 1975, Page 9

Liquid supplement plant

A 8500,000 plant has been built at Mount Maunganut to produce a low-priced liquid supplement comprising basically molasses, urea and phosphoric acid, with trace elements and vitamins added. It began production recently.

It belongs to Agri-Feeds. Ltd, which is jointly owned by Dalgety New Zealand, Ltd. and two American companies, Agri-Lines Corporation and Anzamco, Ltd.

The manager of AgriFeeds and of the new plant. Mr A. R. McWilliam,

believes that the attention paid to animal nutrition is disproportionate to the big money spent on animal healtli.

“Pasture feeding is a limiting factor,” he says, “because the nutrient composition of grass does not always correspond with the nutrient requirements of productive animals. Better nutrition is the main factor contributing to higher conception rates, calving percentages, birth weights, rates of weight gain and milk production . . .

“At a time when cattle prices are low it may be the wrong arithmetic to ask whether a dollar’s worth of production can be achieved from a dollar’s worth of extra feedstuffs. The more important question, however. is how many dollar’s worth of production will be lost as a result of not supplying a dollar’s worth of extra feedstuffs. After all, a large proportion of an animal’s daily food consumption is required simply to maintain the animal with no production whatsoever, so the longer the animal is held the more feed is consumed for no profit.”

Animals obtain the supplement by licking a

wheel set in the lid of a self-feeder (as seen in the accompanying photograph).

The wheel rotates as it is licked, picking up the slightly tacky supplement inside the tank as it moves round. The principle is similar to that of a “water wheel” for melting adhesive stamps. Mr McWiliam said that the supplement was most commonly used to compensate for the lack of protein in roughage feeds such as hay, fodder crops or silage, and crop residues. One tonne would supply 100 cattle with lllb a head a day for about two weeks, costing less than 80c a head a week.

At the plant, the raw materials are mixed in varying proportions to make a range of feed supplements and other products. Levels of protein are varied to suit different seasonal conditions.

Other products manufactured at Mount Maunganui are used to combat the metabolic diseases of bloat and hypomagnesaemia (grass staggers). Agri-Feeds has produced the first grass staggers remedy in New Zealand containing magnesium sulphate, overcoming the problem of insolubility encountered with other magnesium sources. An anti-foaming agent has been added to some formulations to aid in the prevention of bloat.