Cows eating syrup from ethanol plant

[WildRoseBeef]

I had a friend (well, have a friend) that HAD a brown swiss cow. they fed her bakery leftovers all the time, for about 6 months. one day, she went down, and got bloat. the vet could not help her. Said it was from the yeast in the blueberry cake or some such thing they fed her. poor girl.....death by desserts.

Yeah that's what it was! Something about the ingestion of too much yeast would cause bloat that I read about, it was in the Canadian Cattlemen Magazine that I get all the time. I wish I had the article in front of me, but I remember the producer who bought bakery leftovers from Edmonton and had it trucked up to his ranch up by Fort Assinoboine (not too far from where I live), he would only feed the cows once every couple days and in small amounts because of the threat of bloat and they'd get too fat if fed too much of it. Cows loved it though, and he'd feed it like JHM does, in troughs, mixed with some roughage or something like that.

Gosh I wish JHM would be able to tell us how much he gives his cows and how often, I'm quite interested to know...and I'll come back with that article from the CC Mag. from a few months ago...

 

[jhm47]

It's kind of a guess as to how much syrup the cows actually eat, but my best guess would be about 20 - 25 lbs a day average. I don't allow them to have access 24/7, just about every other day. There has been no problem with them overeating, and they don't seem to get diarrhia from it.

It is very different from bakery waste, in that the carbohydrates are taken out of the corn in the fermentation / distillation process.

The corn is ground as it comes into the plant, enzymes are added to break down the starch, and the resulting slurry is heated to 185 degrees. Then, it's cooled down to around 90 - 95 degrees through a heat exchanger (this heat is used in another part of the plant), and yeast is added. The resulting "beer" is allowed to ferment for about 48 - 52 hours. During this time, the temp is carefully regulated, and samples are taken often to assure that bad bacteria are not interfering with the yeast. Yeast cells are babied and fed various fertilizers, like urea, or ammonia. If a bacterial infection is detected, antibiotics may be added. Most of the antibiotic is later destroyed in the distillation process.

When the yeast has done it's job and the starch is used up, the beer is run through a centrifuge, and much of the solids are removed. The solids are called "wet distillers grains", "wetcake", or sometimes "mash". This is an excellent feed for cattle. Many plants dry this product, and it is shipped all over the world. This is called DDG, or DDGS (the S is if they also dried the syrup).

The liquid that comes out of the centrifuge is run through distillation. It is heated to very specific temps, and the distillation towers separate the alcohol from the other liquid. The alcohol has a lower boiling temp than the water, so that evaporates first, and the rest of the liquid is left as syrup. This is what I feed. It comes out of distillation around 120 - 140 degrees, and has very similar nutritional value as the wetcake. Since the particle size is much smaller, it flows much like ketchup. The syrup is quite acidic (around 2 - 3 pH). This helps to limit the amount that the cows eat at one time. They absolutely love it, and it's quite a scene when I feed it. Much pushing and shoving.

The alcohol that comes out of distillation is around 190 proof (95% pure alcohol). This is then run through a molecular sieve. The mol sieve removes the rest of the water, and the result is very nearly pure alcohol (200 proof). Most distilled beverages like whiskey and brandy are around 80 proof. I have a small sample of 200 proof, and have always wanted to taste it, but since my wife has a drinking problem (she gets mean when I drink), I haven't dared.

Now, since the beer had a lot of yeast growing in it, the byproducts contain lots of dead yeast cells. They cannot survive the distillation process. These cells are an excellent protein source, and the cows do well on them. Since the carbohydrates are removed, there is little or no chance of bloating. Yeast produces alcohol and carbon dioxide when it works on sugar, and since the sugar is almost totally removed, the syrup is a very safe product to feed.

I apologize for this long novel. If you have read this far, you now have a very simplistic idea of how ethanol is produced. Sorry if I have bored you.

PS. My wife works in the laboratory of an ethanol plant, and I marketed the byproducts to cattle producers for about 6 months.

 

[laughingllama75]

Didn't bore me....I like to learn new things. I will have to show this to hubby. thanks so much for sharing!

 

[wynedot55]

back in the 70s we feed maltage to our milk cows an heifers.an a friend of ours fed his milk cows the liquid matage.an his cows would get drunk on the stuff.

 

[jhm47]

Believe me, all the alcohol is removed from this stuff. It's far too valuable to waste in syrup.

 

[WildRoseBeef]

That was interesting, thanks JHM.

I remember a while ago me and a bunch of colleagues went to tour a beef farm that used beer to feed the cattle, only it was flat beer, not the kind that comes in the bottle in the bar. It was a few years ago, but from what I vaguely remember, it was mixed with silage and I think molasses (I could be wrong about the molasses) to make the feed more higher in protein and energy. The owner got it from a local Molson Canadian beer plant that operated in the city (Edmonton). Never got to taste it (I don't drink btw), but the process he used was fascinating nonetheless.

Now for that article I promised I'd bring up...

 

[WildRoseBeef]

Excerpts from December 2008 Canadian Cattlemen Magazine:

A little over a year ago [John Ellens near Fort Assiniboine, Alberta] planned to background his calf crop through the winter and had heard a local fellow had access to left-over and cull bakery materials from large factory bakeries to the south of Edmonton.

"Through the whole fall and winter we fed about one to one and one-half pounds per head per day to the calves depending on how cold it got," says Ellens. 'We'd feed it with five-gallon pails top-dressed on hay I rolled out. We gauged their eating using a hotwire and they got just enough to hold them over at the right gain to the spring to go to grass, we weren't trying to fatten them at all.'

The article goes on to say that it's a mixture of breads, muffins, cake, and doughy material that had been run through a mixer before he gets it so that it's broken down a bit but doughy and tacky enough he could still almost make a ball in his hands. It has to be stored in a barn because the deer and birds really like the stuff and will clean it up faster than he can feed his steers. The price of the product fluctuates with grain prices somewhat, but it comes well below feed grain supplement price.

Ellens says the bakery leftovers are full of sugar and fat and its a cooked product for the most part. He calls it "explosive" to cattle so it must be fed with care and certainly not much should be offered.

"It's a really high energy supplement so we never feed it to cattle on an empty stomach, they always have a full belly of hay before they get access to even a bit of this bakery leftovers," he stresses. "It's been baked so it's very highly digested or broken down in the rumen so if you don't take good care the cattle will get acidosis in no time. That's why we limit the amount and always top-dressed on hay."

Ellens says the leftovers worked well for them but might be cumbersome for a larger outfit to handle. Last year's [2007] product came with some oat hulls mixed in to dry it down a bit and keep it from freezing in a pile. He feeds it by the pail because they didn't want to start a tractor in the winter. Every second day he'd roll out two bales of hay with the pick-up, set the hotwire and daily lay down the bakery leftovers on top and move the hotwire to allow the cattle access.

"We went for 10 or 11 months without having to start a tractor," he says. "Now I've got a quad and small trailer where I'll put the pails in and that will speed things up a bit but I still won't start the tractor. It's just another way for us to keep costs down and give a fighting chance to make a profit."

The article also goes on to say how it really tames the calves up. They just go nuts for the stuff and become so tame they could do almost anything with them. And of course the calves'd be so desparate to clean up the crumbs and left overs that got on the other side of the hotwire, they'd be on their knees, tongues stretched out to get the last bit. John says that when he'd kick a bit of bun or bit of bread out to them and those calves'd just jump on it. He also found it was real easy to keep an eye on them for sickness, and even easier to handle them when they had to be sold.

 

[jhm47]

The bakery article is very interesting, but we must remember that we are discussing two entirely different products. The bakery waste is very high in sugar and starch. The product that I'm feeding is very low in carbs. My product is high in protein and corn oil (fat).

You see, when a bushel of corn (56 lbs) goes into a plant, It is processed, and the starch is removed. The remaining solids (all the protein and oil) are not affected, so 17 lbs of solids remain. This 17 lbs still contains the 4% of fat and 8% of protein that originally was in the bushel of corn. Now you can see that the fat and protein are greatly concentrated in the byproduct. Since the carbs are removed, the ability to produce carbon dioxide is nonexistent, and the cattle can basically eat as much as they want.

 

[wynedot55]

now that was a good read.

 

[WildRoseBeef]

The bakery article is very interesting, but we must remember that we are discussing two entirely different products. The bakery waste is very high in sugar and starch. The product that I'm feeding is very low in carbs. My product is high in protein and corn oil (fat).

You see, when a bushel of corn (56 lbs) goes into a plant, It is processed, and the starch is removed. The remaining solids (all the protein and oil) are not affected, so 17 lbs of solids remain. This 17 lbs still contains the 4% of fat and 8% of protein that originally was in the bushel of corn. Now you can see that the fat and protein are greatly concentrated in the byproduct. Since the carbs are removed, the ability to produce carbon dioxide is nonexistent, and the cattle can basically eat as much as they want.

Oh I understand that we are talking about two different products, but the goal and the use of these two different products is quite similar; make use of waste products in the production of cattle.

Thanks for the pointers on how the corn gets processed to what you feed them.