Setting up a feed workshop: premises, equipment, flows, dust, safety

This lesson is part of Making feed on the farm, expert level specialisation. It opens to every registered student, from free registration. Levels 1 to 5 and the tracks remain readable by everyone.

Level 11 showed you the four machines of a farm workshop. This specialisation starts where it stopped: you are going to design the workshop itself, like an expert who has to run it every day without an accident, without mould and without a lost bag. How many tonnes per day? What floor area? In what order are the stations? How does dust move, and why can it burn? Who is allowed to open the grinder? Each question is answered with a worked example for a medium-sized Ivorian farm, then turned into a floor plan and rules posted on the wall. A well-designed workshop produces a consistent feed; an improvised workshop produces surprises.

• ✓Calculate the capacity of a workshop in tonnes per day from the farm's consumption and deduce the size of machines and stocks
• ✓Draw the plan of a workshop in forward flow, with its zones and its direction of movement
• ✓Control meal dust: where it is born, why it is dangerous, how it is captured
• ✓Write the safety rules of the workshop (machines, electricity, noise, lock-out) and post them

1. Start from consumption: capacity in tonnes per day
2. Stocks: how much room for the bags
3. The floor plan: forward flow
4. Dust: where it is born, why it burns, how it is captured
5. Safety: machines, electricity, noise, lock-out
6. The typical day and the workshop sheet
7. Going further

• •Capacity = farm consumption (kg per day) ÷ manufacturing days per week, plus 20 to 30% margin; example: 8,000 birds, 920 kg/d, 2 manufacturing days → 3.2 t/d, 7 batches of 500 kg, grinder 4 h (bottleneck).
• •Stocks: 3 weeks of raw materials, 2 to 3 weeks of finished feed, on pallets, 30 cm from the walls, first in first out; they take as much room as the workshop (85 to 90 m² in the example).
• •Forward flow: receiving outside → store → grinding against an outside wall → clean weighing in the centre → mixing → bagging → finished feed store with opposite exit; no going back.
• •Dust: captured at source (hood, cyclone or filter bag outside, closed bin), mask and earplugs, motors dedusted every week; it damages lungs, loses nutrients, goes mouldy and can burn.
• •Safety: screwed guards, stick not the hand, emergency stop tested, lock-out with padlock, electrics to standard with residual current breaker and earth, combustion engine outside, extinguishers, bags carried by two.