Spray Dried Fish Hydrolyslate??

[big ballin 88]

Anyone have any experience with similar products? It is an enzyme digested fish, spray dried hydrolysate product from California and has 100% solubility in water. Supposedly it uses low temperature vaporization. I will contact the manufacturer to further understand their proccess.

I am using some right now and it smells better than any hydroslate I've had before. Smells like the ocean(clams/oysters in particular) instead of decomposing fish. Don't get me wrong, its still super fishy and leaves your fingers smelling like it. But whereas the liquid in a tea smells pretty disgusting, this smells pretty good.

It seems to have less phosphorous and potash(i'm guessing calcium also?) because the lack of solids in this process comparatively to a liquid slurry. It also lacks some fish oil probably due to the low temp vaporization.

The price is what sold me on this stuff(5lbs for less than $30; 1 tbsp/gal), not to mention easy use with soluble powders like seaweed or humic acid Gonna compare it under the microscope to a liquid hydroylsate. It seems to be a great nitrogen source and should be nice when used with KIS seaweed extract and soluble humic acid.

 

[guest2012y]

Sounds good,I'm starting to take a liking to dried concentrated amendments that you can mix with water. They go further and don't cost as much as the liquids. I know that CC mentioned something about the oils in the liquid being a plus for ??? fungal tea maybe??

 

[Microbeman]

If you wanna contact me through my webpage and send me a sample I run some tests on it.

 

[big ballin 88]

Sounds good,I'm starting to take a liking to dried concentrated amendments that you can mix with water. They go further and don't cost as much as the liquids. I know that CC mentioned something about the oils in the liquid being a plus for ??? fungal tea maybe??

I'm the same way. i hate paying for water since everything is shipped. Water is usually heavier than most of the product i deal with. The only things i really buy nowadays are dry and most likely completely water soluble, i make all my own liquid ferts via FPE.

I've noticed under the microscope that using the addition of fish hydrolyslate does promote fungal activity over no use. I will make an AACT soon to check the differences, if any.

 

[guest2012y]

Sounds like your on the ball brother. I don't even do FPE's...maybe sometime this year.

 

[Mountain]

i hate paying for water since everything is shipped.

Wow...do you have any idea what it costs to dry a product regardless of method? The more the product is processed the more it costs the manufacturer. I've dealt with drying liquids for over 20 years using freeze drying, spray drying, fluid bed drying and a few other methods but that would hit too close to home. Low temperature vaporization? Low temperature processing is usually reserved for high value food products or something that's heat sensitive like bacteria. High heat is not a major issue drying proteins.

Please do find out exactly how they dry it cause I'd like to know.

because the lack of solids in this process comparatively to a liquid slurry

If you don't have a high solid content liquid to start with the drying costs can kill you! It's not the solid content that's the issue but particle size that can be a problem with something like spray drying cause the liquid gets atomized before hitting the drying chamber. Particle size is not a problem with something like freeze drying though. With something like an enzyme digested product all you'd need to do is filter it before drying and that would really help its solubility upon rehydration. It's very unusual to find a company selling a dried product that owns its own dryers as most of the drying work is done through contract manufacturers and you ship material in. It's not cheap to set up a dedicated drying facility.

It also lacks some fish oil probably due to the low temp vaporization.

Low temp processing should preserve oils. During high temp processing oils can become volatile and you lose them.

If lower in phosphorus I'm guessing the bones are a missing component or at least lower in concentration and could understand that part with this type of product.

Anyway...not saying it's not a good product but something seems a bit fishy.

 

[big ballin 88]

Wow...do you have any idea what it costs to dry a product regardless of method? The more the product is processed the more it costs the manufacturer. I've dealt with drying liquids for over 20 years using freeze drying, spray drying, fluid bed drying and a few other methods but that would hit too close to home. Low temperature vaporization? Low temperature processing is usually reserved for high value food products or something that's heat sensitive like bacteria. High heat is not a major issue drying proteins.

Please do find out exactly how they dry it cause I'd like to know.

If you don't have a high solid content liquid to start with the drying costs can kill you! It's not the solid content that's the issue but particle size that can be a problem with something like spray drying cause the liquid gets atomized before hitting the drying chamber. Particle size is not a problem with something like freeze drying though. With something like an enzyme digested product all you'd need to do is filter it before drying and that would really help its solubility upon rehydration. It's very unusual to find a company selling a dried product that owns its own dryers as most of the drying work is done through contract manufacturers and you ship material in. It's not cheap to set up a dedicated drying facility.

Low temp processing should preserve oils. During high temp processing oils can become volatile and you lose them.

If lower in phosphorus I'm guessing the bones are a missing component or at least lower in concentration and could understand that part with this type of product.

Anyway...not saying it's not a good product but something seems a bit fishy.

Mountain thanks for the indepth response regarding drying liquids/slurries. This is one thing that puzzled me, so thanks for the input especially for oil vaporization.

I should have worded some of my statements better, such as the solids statement. What I meant by solids is they grind the fish whole, so bones and all gets ground up, but filtered out. However, this still leaves us with most of the other non-liquids material, but none bigger than 200micron.

So far 12 hours after brewing an AACT I'm not seeing as much bacteria as usual, but there is some similar fungal formation. I'm thinking about taking this tea much longer just to see the changes. i usually brew until about 18hours.

Also this stuff is 100% soluble, it just took some time. Its still smells better than liquid, but only time will tell how good it is. Until than, I'll take it at face value for a fast acting nitrogen source, which i can spray. I agree though, soluble fish powder is still kinda iffy to me....

 

[Mountain]

For some reason a red flag went up when I read your OP. I can understand grinding the fish up before processing but with a spray dryer your particle size needs to be below a certain point otherwise you can clog things up. I can see that with a liquid product, prior to drying, there could be a higher solid content meaning some stuff that would normally get filtered out during the drying process.

A big one for me was the low temp processing...why? It's really not a heat sensitive type product except for the oils but they seem to be removed anyway during processing...

The typical process of manufacturing salmon byproducts involves maceration of viscera or bony by-products and then enzymatically digesting the protein into a liquid soup. During the next stage bones are removed and the fish oil is separated by centrifugation. The final stage is concentration of the hydrolysate by either spray drying to produce a powder, or low temperature vacuum evaporation to produce a thick liquid.

Yeah I'd think fish oils are a high value fraction of the soup they are working with. Another thing is the boiling point drops when something is under vacuum but also I'd venture to guess that drying something under vacuum can inadvertently remove volatile compounds like oils. Like I said something like a fish hydrolysate can be dried at a high temp temp but when they say low what do they consider low and when they compare it that way what do they consider high? I deal with drying some stuff and the material never gets much over 100F and that's low. The term 'freeze drying' is a bit deceptive actually . It's also not how low the material is dried at but how long is the material at that temp?

The more you process something the more you tend to lose things like bioactivity and you just add cost.

I mean about $6 a lb for the dried powder? At that price it almost seems like a waste product they found a market for and at least retrieving something.

 

[DARC MIND]

At that price it almost seems like a waste product they found a market for and at least retrieving something.

fish oil is a pretty big market,let alone the meat and if im not mistaken, the waste products are used for horticulture purposes: fish emulsion,f.meal, f. bone meal...

 

[Mountain]

the waste products are used for horticulture purposes: fish emulsion,f.meal, f. bone meal...

That wasn't my point and realize that. I'm just trying to run some numbers through my head looking at the advantages of processing the material even further, drying, for use in agriculture. It seems dried fish hydrolysate is not just for agriculture.

Seems lots of higher value products derived from fish hydrolysate and kind of saying anything they're selling at like $6/dry pound for agriculture MAY be like the butt end of the processing stream that they can't get more for it elsewhere cause they have extracted a lot of the goodies already. I'm probably wrong though...lol.

Interesting stuff to me more than anything else. If it works and provides a good cost-to-benefit ratio over an unprocessed liquid then what does it really matter?

Seems they concentrate hydrolysate at 60 C (140 F) and under vacuum. Probably hard to dry it any other way in enviros with a high relative humidity, which most fish processing plants probably are as they're next to the ocean, unless they blast it with heat like with conventional spray drying.

There was a small fish product company I went by once near Raymond Washington and might be Pacific Gro(?) and they can deliver gallons to the field for about $4/gal with a gallon weighing in at 8.8 lbs which reflects a pretty good solid content. It might have been someone else but for sure a good fish fertilizer producer in that area. So, in volume, a gallon will yield like 1.5 lbs dry equivalent on the conservative side maybe?

Anyway...fun stuff to try and figure out what the story is

 

[big ballin 88]

Just for the record I don't suspect this stuff to be fish in general. Maybe clams or some other shellfish, the smell is like that of a clam/lobster boil, almost sweet.

Mountain- Thanks for the article, interesting info. It seems that if done correctly fish hydrolysate powder can be a good thing. Good to know about the oil though. It also helps me understand why the nitrogen content on my spray dried product is so much higher than that of a liquid. The manufacturer is California Spray Dry and I have wrote them today by email. I will call them when i get some time.

Results in AACT werent as good as usual, but also my vermicompost has changed significantly due to an huge amounts of flooding that had occurred, making my bin anaerobic. It had been drained and dried 4 days ago and diversity was alright. There was some strong fungal growth though, actually a little more than I typically see. The bacteria count was lower than normal.

 

[Mountain]

Just to add...Pacific Gro's hydrolysate is made via cold processing and is not filtered or processed in any way so contains all of the fishy components. Looks like they'll soon offer a dry product. A gallon direct from them is $15.95.

Most of our competitors use heat to extract fish oils and sell the leftovers as fish fertilizer. The heat process always stands the chance to disrupt the amino acid and protein chains thereby making a less bio-active product.

Pacific Gro Fish for Animal Feed
Using the fish hydrolysate wet, or dried as an animal feed supplement has been done for years. I have not personally investigated my hydrolysate effectiveness as a feed supplement, but feel that the protein (+/-) 30% on my natural fish would offer a good source of protein.

Additionally, the oils are not extracted and therefore the omega 3 complexes would be available for the animal. You might recall that the combination of dried raw fish and wheat came up with a protein in the 30% range.

http://www.pacificgro.com/about.html

I drove by their plant but did not have time to stop in. Seems like a great fish product.

 

[guest2012y]

Wow..Salmon hydrolysate,that's very interesting. Nice price as well.
As a general home gardener in the PNW I've used just plain salmon remains as fertilizer with outstanding results.

 

[Mountain]

Back in the early 70's my dad and I would go out into Long Island Sound and catch buckets of junk fish (mostly Porgies), take em back home and bury in the garden. Soon as the ground was thawed he'd go get a trunkful of green cow manure and till everything in. A few months later we'd plant.

A properly dried whole hydrolysate should really rock. Only thing I'd wonder about is preservation/oxidation of the oils.

 

[Mountain]

I think drying something like a nice fresh thick fish hydrolysate might work well processed through something like MCD Technologies Refractance Window Drying equipment. Since MCD is not too far from Pacific Gro maybe they'll hook up? For sure the material off a RWD belt will be in flakes...

Coming Soon! All of the benefits of our Liquid and Spike Fertilizer in a convenient Dry Flake Formula.

Heh heh...maybe? Would probably be mucho better than a highly processed spray dried product.

 

[guest2012y]

I'm going to use this stuff next cycle as a replacement for the liquid. The dried stuff doesn't have the phosphoric acid in it.
http://www.calspraydry.com/assets/pdf/fish-fert.pdf

 

[big ballin 88]

That's who makes the stuff I use Capt. Must be the same. I love it since its easier since I can just mix all my dry ingredients together and then just utilize the mix.

I find that the following mix is a great all around pick me up. I alter it a little for flowering, utilizing less fish.

• 1 Tbsp of HPFS powder
• 1Tbsp-2tbsp of blackstrap molasses(big difference between non-blackstrap regarding nutritional content. Also NOT ALL BLACKSTRAP IS EQUAL in nutritional content)
• .5 Tsp-1tsp of KIS soluble Kelp
• .5 Tsp of humic acid

One thing, you have to agitate it when mixing....

 

[Microbeman]

I'm going to use this stuff next cycle as a replacement for the liquid. The dried stuff doesn't have the phosphoric acid in it.
http://www.calspraydry.com/assets/pdf/fish-fert.pdf

Have you spoken to the manufacturer? On the surface it appears they have removed the oils, [which they sell separately or add to animal feeds?] which is probably the number one reason for using hydrolysate. I'm easily wrong, as I just glanced over their site.

 

[guest2012y]

Sweet an ICmag pioneer of the product. I expect it's pretty good stuff and will go a long way for the price. CT and Coot found it available in our neck of the world at an affordable cost.

 

[guest2012y]

Have you spoken to the manufacturer? On the surface it appears they have removed the oils, [which they sell separately or add to animal feeds?] which is probably the number one reason for using hydrolysate. I'm easily wrong, as I just glanced over their site.

Good question... EDIT: They state that they remove most of the oils. Perhaps I may consider using the liquid as the source for my fungal teas,and the powder for my fert tea.