Development of a Power Operated Continuous Animal Feed Mixer

Uniform mixing of the ingredients of a complete and balanced cattle feed comprising of roughages, concentrates, minerals and vitamins is a significant and critical operation. Traditionally, the ingredients are mixed manually which is not only time consuming and cost intensive but results in non-uniform mixing of feed ingredients. In the present study, a continuous, power operated, roughage based feed mixer has been developed and tested for its capacity and uniformity of mixing. The capacity of the machine was found to vary from 240 to 360 kg/h for a feed composition of wheat straw (60%), ground mustard cake (35%) and molasses (5%). The mixing index of the mixed feed varied from 4.5 to 4.64%, which indicated the uniform mixing of all the feed ingredients. The cost of mixing of this machine was found 83.75 percent less than the manual mixing which indicated a significant saving in powered feed mixing.