A22-Lwea«ter Farming, Saturday, February 16,1985
“On the road again” with Schnupp’s Roast-A-Matic
LEBANON - Billows of steam
cascade through the cold winter
air, and a smell faintly
reminiscent of fresh roasted
peanuts teases the nostrils. From
within the steamy cloud come the
thundering sounds of chugging
motors, tumbling grains and
roaring flames.
Schnupp’s Roast-A-Matic is on
the road again, turning another
batch of raw farm grain into a
digestible, protein or starch-rich
feed ingredient.
Roast-A-Matic is the business
brainchilded fourteen years ago by
former poultryman Dale Schnupp,
of Lebanon R 6. Today, that
business is operated by the ag
entrepreneur, his wife, Velma,
who handles the office work, their
three daughters lending a hand on
the phones, and a staff of em
ployees who design, build and
operate these interesting
processing machines.
More than 3,000 fanners, either
directly or through custom
operator owners of Roast-A-
Matics, utilize roasted grains from
the unique process in their feeding
programs. Although cutomers
today hail from the Atlantic
seaboard to Nebraska, and from
Tennessee to the Canadian in
terior, Dale Schnupp was once
ready to “throw in the towel” on
the whole idea.
While working as a former grain
cleaner operator for the Reist Seed
Company, along with running the
family’s 18,000 layer business,
Schnupp occasionally ran across
cleaning customers with an in
terest in roasting their own
soybeans for feeds. Bean roasting
had enjoyed a surge of interest
about 25 years ago, but never met
with very notable success from the
feed utilization angle.
Still, three of Schnupp’s farmer
friends wanted to get into on-farm
roasting and feeding of soybeans,
but were reluctant to sink a
financial investment into the
needed equipment.
“That was the birth of the idea,”
Schnupp relates.
Admittedly, business was slow at
first. Not only were farmers not
acclimated to the idea of roasting
and feeding their own raw grains,
Paul Lehman monitors the speed of grain flowing into the
roaster's rotating drum, where it passes five times through a
propane-fired open flame, sterilizing and pre-digesting raw
feedstuffs.
but earlier experiments simply
had not shown convincing results
from the feeding end.
And Schnupp’s early customers,
for the first three years, just were
not seeing the results they wanted
either. By the fourth year, Schnupp
figured the whole idea was
something of a failure, but the
reason was that the beans simply
weren’t being roast hot enough.
He speculated that he had
nothing to lose, and redesigned the
process to slow down the bean
flow-through and gain a higher
temperature.
“I figured I had already lost
anyway, and decided I’d try
anything at the point,” says
Schnupp, remembering that period
of the business in which he
seriously considered simply selling
out all the equipment.
“It was against all better
knowledge at the time. The
thinking was that, if the grain was
heated that hot, there’d be nothing
left.”
For three months, Schnupp
experimented with the higher
heated beans for his customers.
Feeding results, better producing
livestock, and happier customers
soon told him it had been a gamble
that would pay off.
“Business started to snowball,”
he says of the turning point in the
grain-roasting venture. Growth
over the ensuing years has un
derlined the need for this on-farm
roasting service.
But the move to get the beans to
a higher temperature created a
slowdown in per hour volume, and
Schnupp continued to seek ways to
devise a more efficient process,
while working out “the bugs” of
the grain roasting business.
Four years ago, Schnupp made
what he now calls his “second best
move,” and began to build his own
Roast-A-Matic machines. He
operated his own machines on the
road but there was a mushrooming
interest by farmers who wanted
their own.
What the roaster does is sterilize
and pre-digest grains. In the case
of soybeans, the heating process
breaks down the oil cells and
destroys two toxic enzymes
present in beans in their raw state.
- ,TS
£ f
* * y.
Billowing "bean steam" lends a sort of unearthly look to area farms as the Schnupp
Roast-A-Matic processes soybeans for use in livestock rations. Once heat-roasted, grains
can be stored for longer periods of time without spoilage.
In high starch grains, such as
com, the heat causes the starches
to begin converting the sugar, pre
digesting the product and making
it easier for utilization by the
digestive systems of animals.
Molds that foster spoilage are
also destroyed in the heating,
making it possible to store grains
more readily, and any low-level
spray residues are eliminated as
well.
“It basically goes back to a more
natural feed product,” assesses
Schnupp, after a decade of per
fecting roasting techniques,
mostly through trial and error.
Beans are continuous-flow
metered at a controlled rate into
the machine and fed into a rotating
drum, similar to a cement-mixer
set-up. A propane-fired open flame
shoots into the drum; and as the
grain turns, it makes about five
passes through the flame while
moving through the drum. Grain
gets about a half-minute of actual
flame exposure, heating to a
temperature of 240-250 degrees.
Since the gram is constantly
moving, overheating or burning at
any one spot is avoided.
Initially, Schnupp roasted grains
at the rate of three tons per hour,
then about nine tons with a second
machine he had purchased. With
his own roasters, volume has been
charted as high as 18 tons ner hour,
but the average is about 15 tons for
most processing.
Because it is the actual exposure
to an open flame that does the
sterilization and pre-digestion, this
process of handling raw grains, he
says, is considerably more ef
ficient than standard grain drying.
In standard processes, fuel is used
to heat the air around the grains,
and the air in turn dries the gram.
“That puts us into a whole new
market,” figures Schnupp. “A
roaster can be used in place of a
grain dryer. Quite a few farmers
are now doing that, and seeing
-better feeding results.”
Grain producers cannot yet
expect to see a better market price
for roaster-processed grains, over
those dried by standard methods.
However, Schnupp does foresee a
day when the market will reflect
the feeding value added to grains
by roasting.
No real studies have been done in
the past by university or ag
business researchers on grain
roasting, but a few facilities are
now taking a comparative look at
the finished product against
standard-handled grains.
the business got its foot
hold in the feeding programs of
local dairymen, but other
producers began tapping into the
idea when faced with piles or bins
of spoiling grains. Schnupp
■u
' 4
Paul Lehman, son-in-law of Dale and Velma Schnupp,
operates one of the two Roast-A-Matics kept on the road in
Pennsylvania and adjoining states
recounts one instance when grain
that was “ready to be hauled back
out to be dumped on the fileds,”
was roaster-processed, and in
stead salvaged as a useful feeding
by product.
Pork producers have in recent
years jumped on the roaster
bandwagon, with some tallying up
to ten percent in feed savings and
keeping Schnupp’s firm scram
bling to keep up with demand. One
200-sow, farrow-to-finish pork
producer related to Schnupp that,
in the three years since he began
using roasted grains, he’s not paid
a single veterinarian bill
Canadian farmers are
displaying a boom-business in
terest in roasters, too, and
Schnupp spent a great deal of time
over the last few months setting up
a distributorship in Ontario.
The Roast-A-Matic company
keeps two roasters on the road,
primarily serving counties
surrounding the Lebanon
production site, plus into Maryland
and Eastern Shore areas.
Numerous other roasters are now
owned by farmer-custom
operators who process for their
neighbors, including one owner as
far away as the western border of
Nebraska.
With a definite niche already
carved into the feed business,
Schnupp is taking roasting one step
further; he’s hired a nutritionist to
work with customers on setting up
their own feeding programs based
on the roasted home-grown grains.
“This gives farmers just one
more possibility for their feeding
programs,’’ is how Schnupp sums
up this roasting business he’s
pioneered.