Behind the scenes at the mill
All eyes now on Skye after success of feed division in Norway
Mowi’s greatest single investment in Scotland towers 40m above sea level on Allt Anavig quarry on Skye. Apart from a main process building and adjoining dosing and mixing units, warehouses, boiler room, and storage tanks, the Kyleakin feed mill has 15 giant silos for raw materials, and another eight for liquids, with the whole plant geared to produce up to 240,000 tonnes of fish feed a year.
The factory, and its equally impressive quayside infrastructure, is a metal monument to the Norwegian owned company’s commitment to Scottish salmon farming.
But for Claes Jonermark, operations director Europe of Mowi Feed, the key to Kyleakin’s success is not its formidable structure but its people.
‘Our biggest asset is our employees; without them, this is all just a piece of steel,’ he told Fish Farmer as he showed us around the mill in January.
There are 55 people employed full-time on the site, which was nearing the end of its commissioning phase when we visited.
Some 70 per cent of those recruited have connections to the local community, although there is still a Norwegian presence, with expertise seconded from Mowi’s original feed plant at Valsneset in Bjugn, Norway.
Most of the staff have been on training spells in Norway, with some there for a year before Kyleakin even opened. They have also undergone training with the suppliers.
Jonermark, a Swede, said Scotland’s ‘piece of steel’, which cost an overbudget £125 million to complete, has a different function to Valsneset’s.
In the Norwegian plant the focus is on bulk, with an annual capacity of 350,000 tonnes, but Kyleakin is more of a specialist unit, making feed for every stage, from freshwater to grow-out.
The two plants operate as one though, with a very wide range of products which cover all of Mowi’s needs.
Jonermark said Kyleakin, which became operational last summer, is capacity building, with volumes dependent on the market, both for Mowi’s own farms and for external customers.
Final 2019 quarter figures for Mowi (see box) show that Kyleakin produced under 20,000 tonnes against Norway’s 93,000 tonnes, but the plant is in its start-up phase and production can be scaled up to 800 tonnes a day.
‘The production capacity is there, with the two extruders, but you need a lead time to secure the raw material supply,’ said Jonermark.
‘But in a few months we can get up to full capacity if we have the market for it – and we don’t have it right now.
‘This factory was built for Mowi but, yes, we are also open to business from others if they are interested. It will be a while before Mowi consumes 240,000 tonnes.’
Mowi’s hopes must be high for Scotland, though, after the success of its feed division in Norway, which made an operating profit of 15.9 million euros in the fourth quarter of last year, and paid for itself in three years, according to Mowi Scotland boss Ben Hadfield.
Kyleakin has delivered its Neptune range of feeds to the company’s salmon farms on the west coast and the Hebrides, organic feed to Ireland, and has supplied the Faroes and Norway, too, as well as European freshwater production. This year, Mowi
In a few months we can get up to full capacity if we have the market for it”
plans to be self-sufficient in feed requirements in Europe.
A large part of the massive investment in Kyleakin was in the logistics. The plant sits on approximately 350,000m2 of land but, as Jonermark says, ‘this is a marine facility’.
Mowi extended the existing quay wall and built a new pier to accommodate the vessels and tankers bringing in raw materials and LNG fuel, and going out with the finished feed.
‘The capacity is 240,000 tonnes a year – that is 240,000 tonnes coming in (raw materials) and 240,000 tonnes going out, so the pier had to be designed for a very high capacity, as well as for bad weather… always an issue, like Norway!’ said Jonermark.
At the pier, raw materials are vacuumed at 300 tonnes an hour by an unloader/suction plant,
entering the building through a conveyor. Finished feed goes out on a conveyor, also at 300 tonnes an hour, in bulk- that is, bagless.
In Norway, 85 per cent of the feed volume is in bulk, going directly into silos on boats, to reduce manual handling and using as little packaging as possible.
On Skye, some 95 per cent of the volume is delivered by boat and they are currently distributing 40 to 50 per cent by bulk, but this is increasing every day, said Jonermark, with delivery by boat providing environmental as well as economic benefits.
Smaller bags of feed continue to be delivered to nearby farms by Corpach based haulier Ferguson Transport.
Mowi built two 3,000-tonne capacity ships for Norway at the same time as it built the Valsneset factory in 2014. But for Scotland, it is using older bulk and bag carriers, also from Norway, the 1,826 DWT Eidholm and 1,200 DWT Mikal With, to dispatch its feed.
Factory floor
There are two main parts of the factory (which was constructed by builder Robertsons and consultant Thomson Gray), one for treated materials, the mixing and milling side, and one for untreated.
Jonermark begins the tour in the ‘clean side’. Each of the seven levels is self-contained, and it is only at the stairwells, when you peer down, or up, that you grasp the full scale of Kyleakin.
Inside the control room on level three, the factory’s ‘engine room’, banks of computer screens monitor the extrusion process.
Jonermark draws a diagram on a white board to explain how the feed is made and shows us samples – of pellets without and then with oil.
‘Salmon wants a feed with high protein content and high fat content but it’s not especially interested in starch,’ he said.
‘And salmon is like us humans, we need a lot of protein when we’re young and when we get older we tend to eat more fat instead in our diets.
‘In the feed, what you want is high protein raw materials and of course you use fishmeal as part of it. It depends a little bit on the type of market and product and what age the salmon is, but roughly 10 per cent of fishmeal is in the formulation, that’s an average for Mowi.
‘Then we use other high protein vegetable raw materials like corn gluten (the protein part of the corn), soy protein and wheat gluten. And beans and high protein vegetables – there is quite a big raw material portfolio that we use.’
Jonermark said they try to source as much locally as possible (the wheat and corn gluten, for example, is from the UK), while fishmeal is normally from the UK, Portugal, Denmark, Norway and Iceland.
The dry raw materials are pre-mixed and then ground into a very fine meal. Then micro ingredients – vitamins and minerals – are added.
The meal mix with the right content of dry raw
materials is placed in the extruder machine – ‘which is a screw’, said Jonermark.
A big part of the feed manufacturing process is preparing the raw materials for the extruder but the extruder is what decides the quality of the feed.
‘And the machines need a good operator with at least two years’ experience of mistakes!’ said Jonermark. ‘You need to make mistakes to learn, therefore it is important to keep your operators.
‘It is like baking bread, more or less. To this meal mix you add steam and the pressure increases and the temperature of the steam increases until at the end of the extruder–- when you have a high pressure and high temperature of much more than 100 deg C- what happens is the pre-mix passes through a matrix of small holes, say 6mm, and a knife cuts it.
‘When it comes out, the water boils off and it expands and you get a pellet. It is a structure of protein and some starch.
‘This pellet now is full of holes, you can almost blow through it. If you put these into water they would just float on the surface and the salmon won’t eat it.
‘We then add the oil – a mix of rape seed oil and fish oil – and you put it in a vacuum chamber which pushes the oil into the holes and fills up the pellet.
‘The oil crystallises and you end up with the finished product. It is now the right nutrition content and it will sink slowly so the salmon will eat it. They don’t eat from the bottom – it has to be sinking slowly in the water for them to pick it up.’
Jonermark said the extrusion process might look very easy but it isn’t: ‘If you have too much air you won’t be able to fill it with oil and then you’ll have a pellet that floats on the surface and that would be no good.
‘The proportion of oil in the pellet depends on what type of product it is, but 30 per cent oil is not unusual.
‘Salmon is a very efficient animal because to produce one kilo of salmon you need 1.1 or 1.2 kilos of feed, but to produce chicken you need 2.4 kilos of feed, and for pigs it’s four something and for cattle it’s eight to 12 kilos.
‘That also means that nutritionally for the salmon, the feed is much more sensitive. You must really be sure that you give the salmon exactly what it needs.
‘It is much more sensitive to malnutrition and that means that quality control and quality checks on salmon feed is something quite unique.’
In the quality testing room at Kyleakin, the team works on testing every batch produced to make sure the nutritional content is right.
They have methods, such as NIR (near infrared spectroscopy), that give results within minutes. They also test physical strength, and measure the durability of the feed.
‘You try in different ways to simulate what happens on the farm because it’s quite demanding physical treatment of the feed, the blowing about of the pellets,’ said Jonermark.
Production runs 24/7 and testing is also continuous, with the quality operators working in round the clock shifts.
‘If you produce in the night and you deliver it the same way to the boat, you need to have the quality team working too,’ said Jonermark.
Gravity
‘A lot goes up and down’ in the feed mill; raw materials enter on the top level, and then gravity is used to transport these down, for dosing.
Then they are lifted again by elevators and go through grinding on level four. And then they come down to level three for extruding. Level four is where oil is added to the pellets. Level five is where the oil is mixed. Drying also takes place in the main process building, as does pre-cooling and coating.
Everywhere, inside and outside the building, there are pipes. A lot of these, said Jonermark, are for air and transport.
‘It is an energy demanding process because you need energy for extrusion itself, and for transport
and in drying and cooling. And it’s also about recovering energy because if you need to cool something at one end and heat something at the other end, you get excess energy you can use.
‘So there are quite a lot of systems for energy recovery. With the air from the dryer, for instance, we take out the energy from the air and we re-use it instead of using new energy.
‘That’s one of the things you see in a new factory like this; if you compare its energy efficiency to an old factory, there is a huge difference, this is much more efficient.
‘That also goes back to the sustainability and the carbon footprint of the feed – we are really top class on the use of energy efficient feed.’
Perspective
We have now reached the top of the building, and Jonermark opens a door that leads to the untreated part of the plant, where the raw materials are taken in. First, though, we must walk the gang plank, a bridge more than 35m above the ground, strung between the main process building and the feed silos. Looking down through the open mesh steel platform gives the best, or maybe worst, perspective yet of Kyleakin’s size.
‘I hope no one is too afraid of heights,’ said Jonermark.
We go inside the top of the silos and walk between them; the area is pristine and there are radars and sensors, but no sign of the materials they contain, although all silos are in use.
For a farmer like Mowi to become a feed company, it was necessary to recruit people with experience of feed, said Jonermark, whose own background is in feed, though not so much in fish feed.
Mowi has R&D and trial facilities in Scotland, at Ardnish, and in Norway at Averøy, where they do continuous feed trials, testing different formulations. The innovation never stops because there are always new materials coming in, said Jonermark.
‘And also you look not only at feed performance, but at environmental sustainability. You also look at the entire carbon footprint for feed. We try to find as much locally produced raw materials as possible.’
He said they consider novel ingredients, just like everyone else in feed, but the priority is to secure supplies.
Mowi said, in last year’s annual group report, that it was ‘evaluating some promising candidates’ in seeking to expand its spectrum of raw materials. These included products derived from insects, alcohol fermentation, CO2 capture and forestry.
Jonermark said: ‘With totally new raw materials, from a food safety perspective you need to know exactly what you’re bringing in, so it has to be tested and tested and tested.
‘It’s not so long since we opened our first feed mill in 2014 so it’s been an enormous development since then. It is a rapidly changing industry, which is part of the challenge.
‘We see advantages with being fully integrated – you have a rapid flow of information back and forth, from feed to farming and from farming to feed.’
After more than five years of producing their own feed, could he make a calculated guess at how much savings there have been?
‘It’s difficult to say because we’ve also had a decline in the feed prices when we went to feed production’ said Jonermark.
‘So, yes, we have made some money out of it but also the entire aquaculture industry has made some profit out of it too. But there has been a very good payback from the factory in Norway.’
If you compare its energy efficiency to an old factory, there is a huge erence” diff