The U.S. Grains Council invited key technical staff from Southeast Asia’s major feedmilling companies currently utilizing U.S. corn and co-products to travel to the United States last week for a five-day educational program at the Northern Crops Institute in North Dakota. This program was designed to demonstrate the advantages of using high-quality U.S. feed grains and their co-products in industrial feed manufacturing. Team members also traveled throughout North Dakota for site visits, stopping at a local grain elevator.
“Participants witnessed how grains were handled, tested and received at one of North Dakota’s county grain elevators,” said Adrian Morales, USGC country representative in the Philippines, who accompanied the group. “The presence of a FGIS (federal grain inspection service)-certified inspection group in that facility, along with the methods employed in classifying and processing incoming and outgoing material, gave team members assurance that U.S. grains were properly graded according to quality prior to reaching export terminals.”
This program is a part of a larger effort to promote and foster sales of U.S. corn and distiller’s dried grains with solubles (DDGS) in Southeast Asia. Until now, the Council’s Southeast Asia feedmilling program included U.S. consultants traveling to the region for one-on-one consultations and the Regional Feed Technology and Nutrition Workshop.
“The workshop has become a prime event for the feed industry in Southeast Asia (SEA) and allows us to reach out to 100 plus technical and managerial staff from all SEA markets (Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore),” said USGC Regional Director in Southeast Asia Adel Yusupov. “This year, the Council decided to bring a team of influencer-type feedmillers to the United States to help them better understand how to properly store and utilize U.S. corn and DDGS in compound feed production. The site visit part is what makes it different from our typical approach of just bringing a consultant to Asia.”
According to Morales, several team members have expressed interest in increasing the amount of U.S. products in their current manufacturing practices. The team also met with Council member North Dakota Corn Utilization Council.
