July 16, 2013

With the intention of replacing the two existing feed mills, Kalmar Lantmän in the south of Sweden decided to construct a new feed mill in Kalmar in 2009 and Van Aarsen won the project, which is the largest order in its 63 year history.

For many years, the feed production plants of Kalmar Lantmän have been the hub of the area's feed supply. The oldest factory, built in 1965, manufactures feed for poultry and pigs. In contrast to Sweden as a whole, the livestock and milk production in the south east of the country is growing and Kalmar Lantmän expects a continual growth and prominent expansion in the chicken and pork industry sector in Sweden. The demand for animal feed remains high and the last 10-15 years, production has increased mainly due to agricultural expansion in livestock in south eastern Sweden.

"We are about to outgrow our old factories, mainly the factories that manufacture pig and poultry feed. To maintain and enhance our high feed safety requirements, to ensure the high reliability of supply and service to our customers, to ensure a low environmental impact in the long term and to maintain competitive prices, Kalmar needs a new feed mill," said Kalmar Lantmän's president Claes-Goran Nilsson, when the project was announced in 2009.

The motivation behind replacing their two existing feed mills is to create lower production costs per tonne animal feed, by using the highest degree of automation, flexibility and efficiency and at the same time achieve vast improvements in hygienic production, ATmosphere EXplosibles (ATEX) and fire safety with a considerable reduction in labour and energy costs.

Now in April 2012 the final signature has been put to paper for commissioning the new feed mill. Van Aarsen International from the Netherlands has won the contract to supply, build and towards the end of 2013 start up a 90 tonnes per hour feed mill. It is the largest independent order ever in the 63 year history of Van Aarsen. With the purchase of this new state-of-the-art feed mill, being a total investment of €45 million (US$59 million) , Kalmar Lantmän will be able to manufacture 275,000 tonnes of feed per year.

"Our first contact with the client was in 2009," illustrates Piet van Bommel, area sales manager Europe and responsible person for this sale. "During a regional sales meeting for our European network held in Finland, we visited a newly built Van Aarsen feed mill that had just opened. We invited potential customers from Scandinavia including Kalmar Lantmän, to join us so we could demonstrate to them what Van Aarsen is capable of." One year later the first meetings took place with Kalmar Lantmän regarding the new plant. From then onwards there was intense collaboration via a project team of Van Aarsen and Kalmar Lantmän to get the best possibilities down on 'paper'. Finally the additional advantages Van Aarsen had to offer made the difference with respect to the renowned competition.

Efficiency, quality, lower production costs, legislation, food safety and ever-rising energy costs lead to conscious decisions being made in the design phase of machines and projects. "At Kalmar Lantmän all these facets have been taken into consideration," said Marc Schlechtriem, project engineer.

"Separate production lines for pigs, chicken and cattle feed, a very extensive raw material dosing system for macro and micro components, high capacity hammer mills with automatic screen exchange for high flexibility, long conditioning times for the hygienisation of the in-feed destruction of Salmonella, bulk loading robots for rapid charging of the bulk carriers are all completely automated by an extensive intelligent automation system that can, if necessary, be remotely controlled by our IT Department for service or support."

Kalmar Lantmän is an independent organisation member of Sweden's largest cooperative Lantmännen. It has 1,947 members which have to be engaged in farming or food production.