Animal Feed – Raw Materials

The animal feed industry serves a market that continues to grow in line with global population growth and increasing demand for animal-based food products.

Without the targeted addition of proteins, the required quantities of animal products cannot be achieved at the desired quality and efficiency levels. As a result, the feed industry relies heavily on high-protein raw materials.

Currently, a significant share of this demand is covered by genetically modified soybean meal, which has an average protein content of approximately 46 % and is associated with high and volatile market prices.

Europe does not cultivate soybeans on a large scale. Consequently, a substantial portion of soybean meal used in animal feed is imported, primarily from South America.

Brazil alone cultivates more than 100 million hectares of soybeans. A considerable part of this land was previously rainforest. Due to the continued expansion of soybean cultivation, further areas of rainforest are being cleared to meet global demand.

This development raises economic, environmental and supply-chain-related concerns, particularly with regard to sustainability, deforestation and long-distance imports.

However, its use in animal feed has so far been limited, as:

• high shell content,

• raw fibres, and

• structural substances

can only be efficiently digested by ruminants. As a result, sunflower extraction meal can traditionally only be added to animal feed in limited quantities.

When used directly as an energy source, its high protein content leads to elevated CO₂ emissions during combustion, exceeding applicable emission thresholds and making such use economically and environmentally unattractive.

In today’s conventional sunflower processing, sunflower extraction meal remains largely underutilised and is treated as a low-value by-product with limited application options.

This is where the HiProSUN process comes into play.

By removing the existing technical and nutritional barriers, HiProSUN enables the almost complete utilisation of sunflower extraction meal and converts it into value-added products suitable for animal nutrition and energy applications.

Sunflower extraction meal is available in sufficient quantities on the global market.

The main sunflower-growing countries and corresponding suppliers of sunflower extraction meal (2020) are:

• Ukraine: approx. 6.7 million tonnes

• Russia: approx. 5.4 million tonnes

• European Union: approx. 4.2 million tonnes

• Turkey: approx. 1.4 million tonnes

• Argentina: approx. 1.3 million tonnes

Additional producing countries include the United States, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Moldova, Iran, Egypt, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan.