If you want to feed it – you’re going to have to mill it down – unfortunately chicken have no teeth – so we need to break down the ingredients in our feeds to a homogenous size before mixing and further processing.

By milling the ingredients down to a similar size, you’re ensuring that your feed mixes well, so that you have an even distribution of all of the ingredients across your entire mixture – ensuring that each animal gets all the nutritional benefit that is available from the feed – in the right quantities, for optimal growth and production, and milled product is digested easier – providing easier access to the energy and fibre in the feed in a shorter time – compared to the animals having to digest whole seeds.

There are many ways to mill down animal feeds, the most popular being hammer mills, due to their simple construction, easy and fairly low maintenance requirement, and lower price. Hammer mills are good for milling down feed to a fine consistency, which is ideal when producing pellets and mash type feeds.
Roller mills are used in feed mills primarily in the production of chick-chick ( a coarse broken maize poultry feed) which is many times fed to free range poultry, as the roller mills are excellent at cracking maize, and producing very few fine particles, minimizing waste, and roller mills are easily adjusted to produce a consistent particle size. Roller mills are also used in the same way for feeding of cracked maize to cattle and sheep – when producing a loose feed – as the cracking of the maize kernel provides increase digestibility for the animals, without producing much dust in the feed, which may lead to some pulmonary issues – especially in feedlot environments. When use in the cracking/breaking fashion – roller mills are also quite energy efficient when comparing capacity to KWH consumption”