Compound Feed Plant for Mixed Livestock Operation — Project Reaches Final Inspection Stage in Zambia

A 10 t/h compound feed production line at a mixed livestock farming operation in Zambia's Copperbelt region has reached the final inspection stage, with RICHI's quality assurance team conducting a comprehensive equipment review ahead of formal handover to the buyer's operations team.

This buyer operates a diversified farming business — pigs, poultry, and some cattle — and the compound animal feed production line is designed to produce multiple feed formulas across these different livestock types using shared core equipment (grinding, mixing) with formula-specific adjustments made through the pellet press die selection and conditioner settings for each product run.

Raw materials available locally include maize (a dominant crop in the region and the primary energy component across most of the buyer's formulas), soybean meal, cottonseed cake (a byproduct of the regional cotton processing industry, used as a protein source particularly in cattle and to a lesser extent pig formulas), and various mineral supplements.

Equipment includes a hammer mill (sized to handle the throughput across multiple formula types without becoming a bottleneck during formula switchovers), a batch mixer with a relatively large batch size to support the higher overall capacity, conditioner, feed pellet machine (ring die, with multiple die options — 3mm for poultry, 5mm for pig, 8mm for cattle formulas — die changes handled manually between production runs of different feed types), and pellet cooler.

The final inspection process this week covers verification of all electrical connections against the design drawings, functional testing of each major equipment component under load (using a test material rather than the buyer's actual feed ingredients, to confirm mechanical operation before introducing real formula testing), and a review of the buyer's operator training needs — given the multi-formula nature of this facility, operator training has been identified as a slightly more involved process than for a single-formula line, since operators need to understand the die-change and conditioner-adjustment procedures for switching between poultry, pig, and cattle formula runs.

Following final inspection, formal handover and the start of formula-specific commissioning (beginning with the poultry formula, per the buyer's production priority) is expected within the next week to ten days.