Listen in as DairyBusiness interviews Lydell Martin on the best practices for roasting soybeans! Lydell brings his years of experience to the table, as he shares the best methods for roasting, cooling, and storing high-oleic beans. What are the benefits of high-oleic soybeans? Lydell covers that and more, all in this video! If you have any questions, or are interested in a soybean roasting system, you can contact Lydell Martin at 315-902-4524.
For a full article on the interview, read below. A few details of conversation have been changed to improve readability. This article is advice only. For all nutritional decisions, you should contact your dairy nutritionist.
DairyBusiness interviews Lydell Martin:
Connie: You are listening to DairyVoice by DairyBusiness News, a podcast exclusively for the dairy industry. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to the DairyVoice podcast by Dairy Business News. I’m your host Connie Cooper with Sealpro Silage Barrier Films by Conner Agriscience. Thanks for joining us today.
Connie: Today, my guest is going to give us an education in soybeans for dairy rations. We have been feeding soy products for years to our cows, but Lydell Martin is taking us further. He has got some interesting perspectives and solutions for dairy farmers trying to maximize nutrition, production, and profit. Lydell is a grain dryer repair man with a Martin. So, welcome to the Dairy Voice podcast, Lydell. Please tell us about yourself, the A.N. Martin Company, and how you got to this point in your career. And let us know why you love doing what you do.
Lydell: In 2003, I would have first started working with A.N. Martin Systems. And I would have started out building grain bins, building elevators, conveyors. And as time went by, in 2010, I would have started doing grain dryer service. I really enjoyed doing service work, working on equipment, and making repairs.
Lydell: In 2020, I started working with some manufacturers on controls on grain dryers. And since grain drying is only four or five months out of the year that I can keep busy with grain drying, there was a there was another salesman at A.N. Martin Systems that had started in with designing and selling some soybean roasting systems. So, we needed automation. So, that is when I got involved. I helped to develop the automation to run the roasting systems and then we started doing tests with some nutritionist companies figuring out how to produce a roasted soybean that is I would say superior to most on the market. Any roasting system can achieve a quality roasted bean if operated properly. Some systems are harder to get a consistent roasted bean than others.
Connie: Why should I even consider roasting soybeans for my dairy herd?
Lydell: When I’m talking about roasting beans today, I am talking about high-oleic soybeans. A large percentage of what is roasted is high-oleic soybeans. Now, roasting soybeans has been around for years. It has never been a huge thing in the dairy industry. There’s been some here and there, but not a huge thing. With high-oleic soybeans, we have been able to reduce feed costs, reduce inputs. We have increased components in the milk fat and protein which is in today’s market components is what is valuable in milk production so the reduction in feed costs and the increase in milk components have been the two driving factors on why to consider roasting soybeans.
Connie: The high-oleic beans, what do they have that’s special about them?
Lydell: The main thing is that I would understand is the linoleic fatty acid in standard soybeans is about fifty percent. And that can cause some issues with the oil in the bean going rancid. Roasting makes that worse. There’s also a limit to how much of that you can feed to a cow. You need to be careful of how much of that you can feed. There’s a limit. You can feed more of the roasted beans than raw beans, but with standard beans, you have to be careful.
Lydell: The high oleic beans have between two and three percent linoleic fatty acid. Now we can start feeding most of our added protein and fat coming from soybeans in our ration. To think of roasted high-oleic beans the same as standard roasted beans, It’s two different feeds. Two totally different like they’re not the same. It’s two different things.
Connie: They almost should have a different name.
Lydell: They should be called a different kind of bean because it is a totally different feed source than a standard bean.
Connie: And you said that this can replace some of the purchased fats?
Lydell: Yes, in your feed ration, some of your most expensive ingredients are going to be like your palm fat, your fats added to the ration, your soy meal, your canola meal. The roasted beans can replace a big percentage of your soy, palm fat, and canola meal.
Connie: And at a cheaper price!
Lydell: If you have farms around your area, like most dairies are in areas where there are a lot of soybeans grown in their general region. And I have seen where you’ll have dairies with soybeans getting grown all around them, getting sold to crushing plants out of the area and extruding them and then hauling the soy meal back to the area or bringing soy meal in from a different area to feed to the dairy cows. If you can take your beans from your local area, from your neighbor, or your crop farmer down the road and purchase the beans from him and roast them and feed them directly to the cows. And there are some farmers who grow their own beans and are selling them and buying soy meal, well, I look at that as huge.
Lydell: If you’re already growing soybeans and you’re selling them to a crushing plant that’s then turning them into soybean meal and then you’re buying them back, there is a great reduction in feed cost by taking that feed from your field, heat treating it properly and feeding that right to your cows. Now, I have talked with dairies in areas like California. There’s an area I was in out there at some dairies and where there are no soybeans getting grown in the area. So, then this is not as interesting as a concept then.
Connie: I’m from California. We’re getting there, maybe…
Lydell: Right!
Connie: We’ll see.
Lydell: Well, I don’t want to say that California is not going to roast beans because there is interest there. I have talked with people.
Connie: Sure.
Lydell: The ag in California is very interesting to me. I’m from upstate New York and it is very interesting.
Connie: Totally different world. Totally different world.
Lydell: Yes.
Connie: This is going to get into agronomy a little bit and maybe you don’t want to go there, but what’s the difference between growing these high oleic and non-high oleic soybeans? Are there any agronomic differences at all?
Lydell: Weed control. At this time, there are chemicals that can be used on standard beans for weed control that can’t be used on high oleic beans. I am not a professional in that area. I’m far from an agronomist. This is just stuff I hear customers talking about.
Connie: Sure.
Lydell: At the same time, I know people who sell seeds that are saying these are all problems that they are planning to have mitigated within a couple years. It’s moving forward. It’s still moving forward. Yes?
Connie: In feeding these, you know, you mentioned transportation. That’s a big issue for trucking these commodities back and forth. But are there any other potential pitfalls and things to be aware of both on the roasting side and on the nutritional side that you’re aware of?
Lydell: On the roasting side, it is very important that they are roasted correctly. There are a few different nutritional aspects where I have seen people have a custom guy come in and roast. In the last six months, I’ve seen two instances. Once a custom guy came into roast, another place where someone was buying from a commercial roaster where they ended up with beans that were not roasted properly and that can cause some significant issues in a herd and cost quite a lot of money quickly. Roasting properly is very important and knowing what beans you’re feeding. Like I said before, like the difference between the high oleic and standard beans, two different products cannot be interchanged.
Connie: And we can talk more about the details of the roasting in a minute, but yes, I also wanted to know if there’s a shelf life to these beans when they’re roasted versus not and how do you store them?
Lydell: So, as far as shelf life, roasted beans, it really depends on how you’re storing them. So, the way we would do it on farms usually is we would roast them and cool them and then grind them and then put them in storage to be fed. So, in that case I’m going to say you’re not going to want to store them for more than a couple of months. Now, if you’re taking whole roasted beans and you are cooling them and then putting them in a grain bin where you can put air on, you can store them from six to twelve months, depending on your facility. So, storing them for six months roasted is not a problem.
Connie: Okay. And then we’ve talked about feeding them to lactating cows. What about heifers and steers?
Lydell: Feeding to steers, there has been shown an increase in feed efficiency.
Connie: Okay.
Lydell: In feeding the in feeding the roasted beans to steers. There’s a limit to how much can be fed. You don’t want to feed more than about 0.03 percent of the animal’s body weight. There is an increase in efficiency in feeding the steers. Heifers have also shown to have better reproductive health. For heifers, the fat from the roasted soybeans can improve conception rates and calf survivability when fed pre-calving. There are benefits to feeding roasted beans to heifers, and there is feed efficiency on feeding roasted beans to steers.
Connie: Let’s get into the whole roasting process. What’s the best method of roasting soybeans?
Lydell: The best method is to have a consistent feed every day. That’s the best method. There’s a lot of different ways to roast beans. From what I’ve seen, I have worked on at least four different brands of roasters. On some roasters, the bean is in the roaster about thirty seconds. On some roasters, the bean is in the roaster for up to forty-five minutes. What we’ve seen is a slow roaster is easier to make a consistent product because if you’re roasting that beans in sixty seconds, a lot of stuff is happening fast and there needs to be a lot more process time after the roaster. Whereas if we have a roaster that is slow roasting, we can get an evener heat with no burn on the outside of the bean.
Lydell: The way we’ve done it is with a slow roaster. We utilize one of the slowest roasters on the market. And what I mean by saying a slow roaster, I’m saying a roaster that has a long retention time. Not necessarily a roaster that doesn’t roast many beans.
Connie: So, is the process then we roast these beans and then grind them before storage or not?
Lydell: We would roast the beans and then we cool the beans and then we grind the beans and put them into your storage then. And as far as storage, we sometimes will go into commodity bays. Some dairies have commodity buildings. Others use hopper bins. I personally prefer the hopper bins. It keeps the feed cleaner and rodents out of it. Different setups work better on different farms.
Connie: The roaster that you’re working with is called the SoyRoaster?
Lydell: Yes. Yes. We call it Soy Roaster.
Connie: Tell me about that unit.
Lydell: It’s a unit with basically an augur in a tube with an oil jacket and we heat that oil up to a predetermined temperature and then the beans go in the one end, and they slowly get augured through. There are a couple brands of roasters on the market with augers. However, they vary a lot on how long the bean is in there, how heavily built they are, and sizes. There’s a lot of variation in that. The ones we use are a commercial built roaster. And the beans would stay in the roaster from forty-five minutes to an hour, depending on how fast you’re running. And then we put them into a steeping/cooling unit.
Lydell: After the roaster, they would sit there for around a half an hour. Then from there, we put them into a grinder. And from the grinder, we blow them into either a commodity bay or a hopper bin. When we started with this roasting process, we had the first couple of systems we did, the nutritionists wanted roller mills. They wanted roller mills to crack the beans. Then they said we want halves to quarters. We put roller mills in a couple months to feed those cows. They wanted the product ground smaller. So, we changed the rolls in the roller mills. We had a system where we changed the rolls two or three times in the first year.
Lydell: Then we started using hammer mills. We do a variable speed hammer mill so that we can break the beans. If somebody wants halves or quarters of beans, we can do that without getting dust. With your standard hammermill, when you put the bean in the top, it’s going to hit the hammers, and you have dust and broken pieces, even if you have a large screen. Whereas we developed a system with our hammermills where we can break the beans. We slowed the hammermills down. We make adjustments and we can break the beans.
Lydell: That way a couple months after putting the system in, if the nutritionist says, “Look, let’s get this finer.”, it doesn’t cost the customer anything to change that meal from halves and quarters to a completely ground soy meal coming out of that roaster. That there has been a big advantage we’ve done.
Lydell: We felt bad on the first systems where we were putting in a roller mill and then we were replacing rolls and replacing rolls, and it cost the customer every time we had made a change. It’s costing the customer more money. Now we have developed a system that you can grind it into whatever your nutritionist feels is best.
Connie: You had mentioned before when we were talking about whether it’s controlled by an automated control panel. Correct?
Lydell: Yes, so, that’s something that we did different than most also was after we did a couple systems, we realized if we’re going to be roasting a lot of beans at large farms, people are not looking for more work to do at the farm.
Connie: Right!
Lydell: Nobody’s looking for more work. So, we need to accomplish this without doing a lot more work. I mean, whenever you add a process to your farm, you’re going to add some responsibility. In the automation process, there’s a lot of different things going on. Motors that are starting, and stopping on this system, so we have an automation panel on it. When you want to start the roasting, you hit the start button, and you walk away.
Lydell: The roaster heats up to a predetermined temperature. The beans start going through and they roast. It steeps. It cools, grinds them, puts them in the finished product bin, all without anybody on site. If I owned one of these at my farm, I would probably stop and look in the door, see what’s going on at least once a day. You should go twice a day. Just stop, look in, take five minutes to make sure everything’s working properly. If there is a shutdown, it will send you a text message. It will start a shutdown procedure.
Lydell: So long as you’re there within three hours, it’s still going to be hot. Things are not going to be cold. It takes a while to shut down. It’s not a fast system as far as starting up or shutting down. It takes about three hours to start. It takes about three hours to shut down.
Lydell: But that’s all right when it’s all automated. If you get a shutdown fault, it’s going to do its own shutdown, and be fine. I recommend if you get an alert saying your system’s shutting down, you want to go check on it because it could it’s going to empty the roaster one way or another. The automation is designed to empty the roaster to get the beans out of the heat. So, you could have some beans on the floor if you don’t check on them within three hours.
Connie: Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha.
Lydell: So, the automation has been huge. That is a huge part of it. I’m going to say that’s close to half the half the system.
Connie: Absolutely, right! You’re not having to stand there and monitor it or have someone do that for you.
Lydell: Most grain roasters need somebody with them at all times when they’re running because of the high fire hazard. Because of our low fire hazard, we do not need somebody there monitoring it. We can monitor everything with sensors.
Connie: Right! And it’s a low fire hazard because?…
Lydell: We do not have any flame or exhaust from the flame coming in direct contact with the beans. Most brands have either hot air from the burner, a couple foot away from the burner, or flames in close contact to the beans, and if you actually look at the beans, the outsides will be browned, like darker brown. The beans coming out of our roaster, do not really change much color at all from raw beans. There is some difference. They are slightly browner, but you don’t have those blackened edges because we’re not putting as high a temperature to the beans as what most roasters are,and they’re not coming anywhere near the flame.
Connie: Tell me, if I choose to purchase one of these, how does the installation go? How is it shipped to me? How is it set up? All that kind of thing. How do I get started?
Lydell: That really varies on the size of your operation, the size of the system you want. We offer a system that’s in a container where we can ship it to your farm. You set it wherever you want it. The whole system is in a forty-foot shipping container. You connect the pipe from the container to your finished product bin and from your raw bean bin to the container. And it’s a very simple setup.
Lydell: If you’re looking for a smaller system or a larger system than that, we will ship the components to you. We have somebody that will come out and supervise to verify the installation goes properly. So, if you buy a roaster system, we will ship the components to you. Somebody would stop out, make sure you or whoever’s installing it understands how to install everything properly.
Connie: Right.
Lydell: And for commissioning, iy depends where you’re located, but I would probably come out to commission your system if you bought one of these because when you buy from us, you’re not just getting equipment. You’re not just getting equipment. I have had people putting in their own systems very similar, and call me months later and say, “I can’t get the nutritional value on these beans that you are saying you can get. What am I doing wrong?”
Lydell: And I say, “Well, when you buy my automation, my complete setup, you’re getting much more than equipment. You’re getting me on site to verify that the system is working the way it’s supposed to. You’re getting your temperatures correct, and in turn, you’re getting a finished product that has the correct nutrition.”
Lydell: The RUP on our systems, your rumen undigested protein is very good. We’re getting very good RUP numbers. And then of course your PDI, which is a standard number that’s looked at with roasting, that we’re getting good, but that is a number that’s much easier to get good than your what I call bypass protein, which would be your RUP.
Connie: How much electricity does the does the roaster draw? And what kind of electricity do I need in order to make all this work? And is that figured into your economic benefit of doing this roasting yourself?
Lydell: The electric draw, the amp draw, would vary a lot depending on your voltage, whether you have high voltage or low voltage. So, I break it down. It takes almost three kilowatt hours per bushel of roasted soybeans. What are you playing with your electric? It’s going to take about three kilowatt hours to run the complete process. That is to roast, steep, cool, grind, convey it to finished product bin. The whole process takes about takes almost three kilowatt hours per bushel. And then you can calculate your cost based on what you are paying.
Lydell: We can hook them up to single phase, low voltage three-phase, high voltage three-phase, whatever you’re working with.
Connie: Labor-wise, how much effort do I need to put into it? Is this an everyday operation? Is this an every-other-day operation? How does that work?
Lydell: So, I touched on a little bit on the automation there. It’s something that you want to stop and check twice a day. It’s very little labor. You’re going to hit the start button. It’s going to run until your finished product bin is full. We always have a safety switch so that when your finished product bin is full, it shuts down on its own. And then when your finished product bin gets low, you stop in, and press the start button. So, I’m going to say for standard operating, it should be fifteen minutes a day at most for operating the system because the automation takes care of running it. You just need to stop and just get a visual on it to make sure everything’s operating properly.
Connie: And I’m assuming that you have different sizes of equipment for different sizes of dairies or if it’s a really big dairy, you’d have a couple of units? How does that work?
Lydell: Up until now, we have pretty much had one size unit, then we would put parallel systems in. We would put up to four units beside each other. Now, if you have a large farm, I’m a big fan of having parallel units as far as two hammermills to grind your corn meal, and two roasters to roast your soybean meal. That way, if one of those machines breaks down, you’re still going. You can run for a couple of days until you get the other one fixed. This is something they do with milker pumps in milking parlors.
Lydell: We have just completed testing on a new roaster. Within the next couple weeks, we’re going to start marketing them. I personally was on site running it for two days. This unit is going to be close to the same capacity as three of our old units. And with this development, there’s a few changes we’ve made to this new unit, so that we’re going to be able to make various sizes. So, we’ll be able to install more one and two roaster systems. Depending on the size of the facility, we should not be looking at these three and four roaster setups anymore.
Connie: Once we’ve got these up and installed, what does the maintenance look like?
Lydell: As far as the roaster itself, the first the first ten years should be very minimal maintenance. We’ve had roasters running for up to ten years , and maintenance has been very minimal. The augur turns very slowly. So, the wear is very minimal. I’m going to say every ten years, you’re probably going to have a little bit of maintenance. In ten years, there has only been one that has burned out a heating element and, on that farm, we had some other stuff burned out, and we think was lightning that actually caused it.
Lydell: I like to say, yes, there is maintenance but it’s very minimal. The main maintenance on this system is going to be your screen in your hammermill and then your hammers. I wouldn’t keep spare hammers on the shelf. You’re not going to change them that often. I would like to have a spare screen for your hammermill on the shelf. Maybe once a year you’ll be servicing the hammermill. But as far as the roaster, it’s going to be quite a few years between maintenance on the roaster itself because the augur is running so slowly and it’s running on Teflon. There’s no metal-to-metal contact.
Connie: You talked about marketing these things. Are you going to be at World Dairy Expo this year?
Lydell: Yes, we’ll have a booth at World Dairy Expo. I will be there, and we will have one of our complete roasting units in the shipping container on site also.
Connie: Okay. Well, thank you so much for this information, Lydell. We really appreciate it. Sounds like something very interesting that that our farmers can look into and save some money, save some time, and get a good product that they are taking care of and making themselves. Do you have anything to add that we didn’t cover?
Lydell: For information on them, go to www.soyroaster.com.
Connie: Okay, www.soyroaster.com.
Lydell: The other thing to mention is we’ve had all of our roasters electric up until now. Some people worry about electric usage.
Connie: Right.
Lydell: With our new models that are hitting the market this month, they can come with propane heat or natural gas heat. They will still have a similar fire hazard to a water heater. As far as when we first looked at going to propane heat and natural gas heat, we were concerned about fire hazard because that has been a big thing with us. We do not like fire hazards. Our new models do offer that, but still have very similar fire risk to a water heater. If you don’t have enough electric to do a lot, or if you’re putting in a commercial system, we can heat with propane.
Connie: Say the website again for me.
Lydell: www.soyroaster.com.
Connie: Well, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. We’ve learned I’ve learned a lot about roasting soybeans that, you know, there’s so many things on a dairy farm that we take for granted, and I guess soybean roasting was something I had never thought that much about before. We’ve got so many things to think about. So, thanks for joining us today. I appreciate it.
Lydell: Thank you for having me.
Connie: We’ve been talking to Lydell Martin of A.N. Martin Systems. I am Connie Cooper with SealPro Silage Barrier Film by Conner Agriscience. You’ve been listening to DairyVoice by Dairy Business News. And the weather’s warm, especially here. Keep hydrated. Take cool off breaks. Stay safe out there. Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk again very soon.
Thanks for reading this article! If you would like to contact us, please call SoyRoaster at 315-902-4524. You can also contact Lydell directly at 315-209-7979.
