The livestock feed industry is under constant pressure from ingredient scarcity, increasing costs and often a limited supply of conventional feed stocks. Ridley Block Operations (RBO), a division of Ridley Inc., has recently invested significant resources to help better manage the ever-changing ingredient landscape by opening the RBO Technology Center at its Worthington, Minn., manufacturing plant this past winter.
The RBO Technology Center includes an R&D laboratory and a pilot plant facility. The RBO Technology Center provides RBO a reliable testing environment for all of its product forms. RBO is now able to perform tests from the laboratory bench up to production scale. A pilot plant facility is also part of the Technology Center, furnished with new and restored equipment that is capable of modifying and testing existing and acquired technology before going into full scale production.
The mission of the Technology Center is to provide technical support for RBO’s production facilities to evaluate new feed ingredients across the wide variety of block forms that are manufactured, introduce new processes that may help bring down production costs, improve existing processes that support employee well-being and safety, develop new products and improve the quality of existing products.
Ridley Inc., headquartered in Mankato, Minn., and Winnipeg, Manitoba, is one of North America’s leading commercial animal nutrition companies.