How to deal with chicken feather ?

Posted by Zeno Pellet Machine on May 27th, 2021

Annually more than 1 million tons of feathers are produced as by-product from European poultry slaughterhouses. The amount of feather as by-product rises steadily with increasing poultry consumption. On the other hand, the increasing consumption of meat products requires more livestock and therefore also increasing amounts of protein rich feed is needed.

Chicken feathers are relatively clean and do not generally pose a health risk. Contamination of feathers with chicken blood and feces can present a problem, but in general feathers are continuously removed from the processing area to make room for new feathers as more chickens are processed. An average chicken processing plant churns out 4,000 pounds of feathers an hour and has a low profit margin per bird, so feathers must be moved or processed quickly and very inexpensively.

Feathers contain 85% - 90% keratin. Keratin is a structure protein which contains proteins needed by animals but it cannot be digested directly. Therefore hydrolysis of keratin is needed to make it digestible. In that process the disulphide bonds in the keratin are broken and amide bonds are broken to form more digestible smaller proteins, peptides and amino acids.

The feather meal machine 

https://www.zenopelletmachine.com/product/feather-meal-extruder-machine/

has adopted first automatic raw wool feeding device and unique raw wool advancing structure can truly achieve high output, reduce the labor intensity of operators and reduce production costs. Energy saving and environmental protection.

Processed feather proteins are used as feed ingredient for pet food, aqua diets and feed for fur animals. Eight essential amino acids in feather protein meal (ARG, ILE, LEU, PHE, THR, VAL TRP and CYS) are present in higher amounts than in fish meal. However, due to the unbalanced amino acid composition of feather, e.g. lack of three other essential amino acids, LYS, MET and HIS, feather meal is only part of complementary feed composition.