Alfalfa pellets are made from ground alfalfa hay (= alfalfa meal). Alfalfa hay is a dried green fodder which contains protein as well as valuable vitamins and minerals. For making alfalfa pellets, you can add binding agent like 1 – 3% of molasses, fat or colloidal clays.
What are Alfalfa Pellets mainly Used for?
Alfalfa pellets can be used to add calories to a horse’s diet. They are a great source of calories for horses, because they are forage-based.
Forage based calories will not cause many of the problems that high sugar and starch feeds, such as grains do. They provide the calories without the “hot” factor. The majority of the horses out there will not get “hot” on alfalfa.
How to Make Alfalfa into Pellets
First Step: Drying
As we all know, material moisture content has a big influence on pellet quality, before making alfalfa pellets, you should dry them to moisture about 15%. For 2T/H alfalfa pellet line, you had better choose a rotary dryer with specifications of Φ1.2(diameter)×10m(length). If your line productivity is less than 500kg/h, you can choose to dry the feedstock naturally in the sun.
Second Step: Grinding
There is a requirement about feedstock fineness for pelletizing, so after drying the material, grinding is necessary before pelletizing. You can choose a Feed Hammer Mill to make the alfalfa into powder about Φ3-5mm.
Third Step: Pelletizing
In this process, conditioning is an important factor for pellet quality. Our ring die feed pellet mill has screw conditioning device, conditioning is almost universally accomplished by the addition of controlled amounts of steam. The conditioned mash then flows by gravity into the pellet mill die chamber where rollers press the softened mash through the holes in a circular die .Stationary knives located outside the circular, rotating die cut off the shaped, dense pellet at the proper length.
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1. Feeder
2. Conditioning Chamber
3. Pelleting Device
4. Speed Reduction Device
5. Motor
6. Base
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1. Meal or Mash
2. Pellets
3. Blades
4. Rollers
5. Die
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Fourth Step: Cooling
When Pellets leave the pellet mill, their temperatures can be as high as 85℃ and moisture contents are high as 17-18%. For proper storage and handling of the pellets, their moisture content must be reduced to 10-12% and their temperature to about 3-5 ℃ above atmospheric temperature. You can choose counterflow pellet cooler in 2t/h pellet plant; for pellet plant with smaller capacity, a horizontal cooling machine is OK.
Fifth Step: Packing
For easy storage, you can pack the pellets into bags, the common weight of each bag of pellets is 15kg/, 30kg, 50kg. Our automatic pellet packing machine has a wide range of 5-100kg/bag.
