U of I farm rations formulated at the Feed Technology Center

URBANA, Ill. — All the feed for the University of Illinois farms — including poultry, beef, dairy and swine — are formulated at the Feed Technology Center.

“This facility is designed to do 9,000 tons per year and we currently run about one-third of our capacity at 3,000 tons per year,” said Leon Peters, facility manager at the University of Illinois Feed Technology Center.

“We have a full-time staff of three people and we hire three or four students each semester depending on the research needs, so that’s a pretty small staff for a facility this size,” said Peters during the 2025 Dairy Tech Tour, hosted by the Illinois Milk Producers Association.

This mill, which has been in operation since February 2021, replaced a facility that was built in the 1920s.

“Everything at the old mill was done by hand,” Peters said. “We had an oat crusher there that was donated to us from the Champaign post office back when they delivered mail with horses.”

Three main grain legs provide the ability to keep the raw ingredients separate from the finished diets.

“We have an intake leg and there is a magnet on the bottom for any foreign metal objects that might be in the grain,” Peters said. “We are trying to prevent that from going in our other processes.”

All the finished mash goes through the mash leg and the third leg is for the pellet line.

The center’s main delivery truck holds 16,000 pounds and has four individual sections.

“We can deliver four different diets to a farm or go to four different farms,” Peters said. “This main bulk load out has four spouts and each spout has three bins above it so we have a lot of storage capacity for finished feed.”

The two metric ton horizontal paddle mixer has a liquid inclusion where fat and oil are added to diets.

“We typically run a three-minute mix — one minute dry mix, add the liquids and then do a two-minute wet mix,” Peters said.

“The mixer has an NIR sensor and it tracks things like dry matter content, moisture, protein and ash content,” he said. “Our hope is it will do a real time diet adjusting for us.”

For example, if there is soybean meal that is supposed to be 45% crude protein, but it is actually 43% crude protein, the system will recognize that.

“The goal is to automatically add the soybean meal that we need to make the diet nutritionally correct,” Peters said.

“On the backside we have our pellet mill and the drying and particle size play a big role as far as the pellet density index and how good your pellets are and how they stay together rather than break apart,” he said. “We can change the diameter and the length of the pellets.”

Once the bags of feed are filled in the bagging line, the bags go through the automated sewing machine and then a uniformity roller to spread the material out within the bag.

“That makes the bag nice and flat so our robot can make a nice stack on the palette,” Peters said.

“It used to take three people at our old facility to bag feed, but with the robotic stacker, it’s essentially a one-person job and the robot allows us to have a consistent stack, as well to transport,” he said.

Since many companies have equipment like the JEM robot, it is a benefit to U of I students to learn how to work with this technology.

“We’re one of the few universities that have something like this so our students will be one step ahead of their peers,” Peters said.

The grain handling facility features three 65,000-bushel GSI bins, as well as a 10,000-bushel wet grain bin.

“We bring all the corn from the U of I farms here,” Peters said.

With the different research projects, corn arrives at the feed center as wet as 27% moisture.

“We’re just getting ready to start on the fall 2024 corn,” Peters said. “So, storing it that long, we typically dry all the corn down to 13% to 13.5%, which is drier than a commercial elevator.”

New to the center this year is the Amber Agriculture grain bin monitoring system on all the bins.

“We drop a sensor into the bin and it monitors relative humidity, CO2 and temperature,” Peters said.

The sensor also has a laser which takes an image of the bin.

“That tracks the inventory levels without someone climbing to the top of the bin and looking in,” Peters said. “It’s a nice system and we have integrated it with our fans, so if we see a rise in CO2 levels, it will automatically kick the fans on.”

All the equipment in the extrusion part of the center is stainless steel for the production of pet food or aqua feed.

“We can add liquids and fats and this machine will incorporate it into the diet,” Peters said. “The material goes across the die plate and this is where the extrusion process comes in.”

Up to four different dies can be used to make various shapes such as stars, squares or donuts.

“The product is conveyed to a two-stage dryer similar to a grain dryer and then it goes to the bagger,” Peters said.

A lot of the equipment at the center is bolted down.

“We have a very modular system so we can upgrade and change our equipment as technology changes,” Peters said. “And eventually we can do equipment research, as well, not just nutritional research.”