It’s as popular with shrimp as it is with shrimp keepers, it’s always fun to watch as it expands in water. You might be aware that it’s made from soy bean husks but how does it go from a bean on a plant stem to the flaky little pellet we put in our aquarium?
In this article we take a look at how snowflake shrimp food pellets are made from farm, to being delivered to your door. It’s a pretty old fashioned and simple process which results in a natural and simple product that shrimp just love.
The process of making snowflake shrimp food
Step 1 – Growing soy beans
It all starts with the humble soybean (Glycine max). This legume of the pea family is native to East Asia but today is grown around the world, especially in South America (of which mostly Brazil & Argentina) and the United States which together account for 80% of the world’s soy production. The plant is hardy and can prosper in a range of soil types but modern agriculture has made a science out of controlling conditions to maximise yields.
If you plant them at just the right depth (1.5-2 inches only) at the right moment (around April when soil temperatures reach 10ºc) and pick varieties ideal for your soil and to resist common local pests, you can increase yields enormously. Modern farmers employ careful monitoring of nutrient health in their plants and targeted delivery of fertilisers rich in Potassium and Sulphur, Nitrates are fixed by the plant’s own roots making their addition rarely required. Farmers around the planet are increasingly mastering the perfection of efficient soy bean growth.
In addition to all the ways humans consume soy directly (soy milk, for example), one of the main uses is feed for animals because of how nutritious it is, rich in protein and fats.
Step 2 – Harvesting soy beans
Soy beans reach maturity green and start filling out with peas in late summer, at this point they have around 45-55% moisture content. In agriculture they aren’t typically harvested at this point, in fact farmers wait to see the pods turn yellow and wait around week more to see them go brown. At this point seed moisture is down to about 15% and they’re ready to fall from the pod.
Modern harvesting is done with combined harvesters designed to scoop up the whole plant, pods beans and all and through the magic of farm machinery the plant stems and pods are graded and ejected and shelled beans are poured into the hopper at the back.
Step 3 – Processing and de-hulling
Soy beans from harvest must be milled before heading off to become one of many soy bean products. Milling soy beans involves grading where broken and damaged beans are removed and then the hulls (shells) must be removed.
The beans are heated and then cooled which causes the hull to crack making it much easier to remove. These treated beans are then processed with a process called aspiration in which the lighter hulls are blown away and caught in something like a giant hoover bag whilst the shelled beans collect below.
Soybean hull constitutes about 7% of the whole soybean and so as you fill a very large container with processed beans you get a fairly large quantity of soy bean hulls remaining. Perhaps historically the hulls were viewed mostly as a by-product to the much more valuable beans. In recent decades it’s become clear that the hulls themselves are a quite valuable product in their own right.
Step 4 – Pelleting
A bag of wispy dry husks is not the easiest thing to ship and process for purposes like animal feed, bio-filtration and in bioplastics (all uses of soybean hulls). So to enable them to be packaged and shipped for use efficiently they need to become denser and easier to handle. One of the primary ways to make use of soy hulls is by condensing them into small hard pellets. This packs all the goodness of the hulls into a small chunk that’s much more cost efficient and practical for usage.
This is done by warming, adding moisture and pressurising the hulls just the right amount so that they bind into a pellet that stays together and hasn’t got so dry the fibres start turning to dust. Properly made soy hull pellets are cohesive enough to pour into silos and animal feed troughs and if stored dry and cool can last for over a year.
Step 5 – Retail
When it comes to buying soy bean husk pellets for shrimp, it’s unlikely you’re going to want to buy it by the ton. The final stage on the journey from farm to shrimp are the shops and online stores that stock snowflake shrimp food.
A good supplier will seek quality product in good condition and store it in a temperature and moisture controlled environment to ensure the customer gets a fresh, sanitary product that the shrimp will love. Because it has a long shelf life, most shrimp keepers with a single aquarium find a 100g bag of snowflake shrimp food does just fine for months of use. As many of us know, one tank is often just the beginning (we currently have four!), so those with many more crustacean mouths to feed will tend to go for a bigger bag like our 200g bags of snowflake. At home they should be stored somewhere dry and cool with the container sealed and you should find they keep well and the shrimp enjoy the last pellet as much as the first.
What have we learned?
Snowflake shrimp food is a very natural product that undergoes a minimum of processing to go from plant to aquarium. It comes from the remarkable and immensely important Soybean plant and has only become appreciated fully for its nutritional benefits in recent decades. It’s versatile as a food but our research showed that they’re useful in making bioplastics and to absorb harmful elements in water filtration. Soy hull pellets are made wherever soy beans are grown at small local scale and very large scale too. Our interest in high-grade soy pellets as shrimp food is just a tiny fraction of their use in the world at large.
We hope you’ve enjoyed finding out a bit more about the product of snowflake shrimp food. For more general information, check out our snowflake shrimp food information page.