Transcript
Speaker: Hi everyone. My name is Stephen Kilgore. I'm the managing editor of Feeding Grain magazine and host of the Feeding Grain podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today as we dive deep into the issues affecting the feed manufacturing, grain handling, and allied industries. Today's episode is brought to you by the Benwip from New Mat Systems. The powerful dual impact Benwip removes the toughest buildup in blockages and industrial storage silos without hazardous silo entry. Learn more today at Benwip .com. My guest today is Keith Bailey, Strategic Account Specialist at Hydrochem Systems.
Speaker: With all the H1N1 news out there, Keith stopped by to talk about biosecurity systems. We discuss how these systems work, what installation and maintenance look like, and the benefits they can offer a feed mill and its customers.
Speaker: I hope you enjoy the interview. If you want to help out the podcast and listening to this in a podcasting app, please rate us and subscribe. If you're listening online, sign up for the feed and grain newsletter industry watch to stay up to date with all the latest podcasts and learn about all the new news happening around the industry. Now onto the show. Hi, Keith. Thank you so much for joining me today. Absolutely. I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker: Well, for anyone who might not know who you are, can you tell me a little bit more about yourself and what you do in the industry? Sure, absolutely. I'm the automated sales manager for Hydrochem Systems. I've been with Hydrochem for a little more than 12 years now. Previous to designing truck washes, I worked as an environmental consultant for 10 years.
Speaker: So I did have a little bit of industry knowledge with regulators and things like that within the environment. Since then I started here and I've pretty much been designing truck washes, which are also used in the biosecurity industry. So I've designed a little more than like 200 washes and a ton of biosecurity ones.
Speaker: Yeah, well, because in the US, especially, it's like the biosecurity part of the feedmail and stuff are kind of logged behind. Like you'll go to some and you'll get the foot wipes and stuff like that. But that's usually as pretty much as far as we go. I've seen a few truck wash systems out there.
Speaker: And what's really interesting to me personally is as all this, they don't want you to call it bird flu anymore. It's something else now that it's in cattle, but as all these kinds of diseases kind of make their way through the US and we have more and more caution about them, things like the systems that you guys make, which can be set up after it seems like a female was built and you can, so you don't necessarily have to, you know,
Speaker: redesign everything for a system that's already in place but maybe hasn't concentrated so much on these biosecurity systems. Can you tell me a little bit more about the systems you design and how they kind of work and what they contribute to the biosecurity of a facility? Yeah, absolutely. I think a big thing is, yes, we can work with a farm that's established because that's the thing. A lot of these farms have been there for a long time.
Speaker: There are a couple of new feedmills that are being designed and brought into the industry. And if we're brought in quickly with that, I can assist with the layout of the biosecurity setup because there's more that goes into the actual layout of the system where it's placed on the property, where you've got clean entrances or clean exits, dirty entrances, where the
Speaker: The green and the red zones are green being clean and red being contaminated. And we like to assume that everything coming off the road is contaminated. So there is a benefit to being on the forefront of it as it's being built. However, like you said, there is a ton that are existing and these feed mills have been there for 50 plus years and we, they need a solution now. They needed one. Usually it started in like 2015 when the first outbreak of AI was.
Speaker: And then, but now that it's kind of continuing, they've realized that yes, we still have to, to do that. So what we do is depending upon their needs, facilities needs, some of them get what we call like full truck washes with a.
Speaker: sanitizing application as the vehicle is leaving the truck wash. So with that being said, the EPA method that they want people doing is a thorough undercarriage and wheel wash with high pressure, high volume water to try to remove any of the mud, things like that, that might have the virus in it.
Speaker: And then following that, an application of some type of sanitizer, what the industry standard is, is quaternary and that quaternary ammonia, it gets applied to the vehicle until it dries kind of like Lysol. You spray it on something as it dries, it kills the virus. So, so that's typically your application method. It isn't an instantaneous kills the virus, but if you apply it correctly at the right concentrations, it will kill it. We've got a lot right now that we've been
Speaker: Helping out the industry with which are just sanitizer arches and what that is at some facilities They'll put one at the entrance and one at the exit of let's say a feed mill or even some large farms And they drive in a photo I sees that they're coming in it turns on it sprays the undercarriage the wheels the sides the top of the vehicle and as they then go onto the farm it dries and
Speaker: They then are considered clean as they then exit the feed mill or the farm. They then get sanitized again because that commingling in the middle there is always where the cross -contamination occurs. So when the virus has the ability to jump off of a vehicle, fall off in mud form and then get slung back under another vehicle or into the tires of another vehicle and get transferred to another vehicle. So they want to kind of place it so that at no point the feed mill
Speaker: they're going to be responsible for it. Now, when the vehicle's on the road, driving down the road, there is a chance that it could pick the virus up along that route to the farm. And at that case, some of the larger farms, they put in the exact same setup where they just drive through a sanitizer on the way in and the sanitizer on the way out to ensure that the truck that's going to the next farm isn't going to be sending a virus to the next farm. So.
Speaker: Yeah, like you said, picking it up on the road, only so much we can do about that. And it's really about controlling like the areas where it's most likely that you could pick up something, right? It's more of these diseases. And you know, we work in this kind of global economy. So, you know,
Speaker: They've been talking about the African swine fever virus for years now, and it will eventually make it to the US. I mean, it just will. It's a matter of time. And the better our system can handle those kinds of things, the better we all are. So for me, it seems like a really good time to invest in something like this, especially because, you know, you can always sell it to your customers that
Speaker: We have a biosecurity system, which the feed mill down the road does not have. So if you're worried about any of these diseases, we're the people to go to. But what are some of the bigger challenges that you guys are finding when implementing these things in existing properties or facilities?
Speaker: I would say the biggest challenge is trying to create a traffic flow that we can mitigate that cross contamination so that we can try to keep dirty vehicles and dirty locations, clean vehicles and clean locations. And when I say dirty and clean, it means that it's been through a sanitizing application and it hasn't. So if a property is able to, a lot of the times they have one entrance and one exit, it's the same one and you kind of come in and you leave. If the property is able to be kind of redesigned a little bit,
Speaker: So that there is a dirty entrance and then a clean exit, it usually lends itself to the best application because then you can be assured that as soon as the vehicle didn't drive through there, there wasn't a dirty truck that drove up that road at the exact time or that entrance under the property at that exact same point. So really that is probably our biggest obstacle. Getting people to use it usually isn't a tough thing because to do a full -size feed truck
Speaker: You're probably talking around 30 seconds, a completely sanitized one. So it doesn't slow them down to the point at which there it's an obstacle. They can hit it running. The bigger challenge is just trying to keep people so that they have to drive through it. Whether it be pickup trucks or anything like that, that's coming on the property. You have to get sanitized. Usually when it's applied correctly and the farmers use it, it works incredibly well.
Speaker: Well, luckily it's at least something that we're familiar with, right? It's not a technology that's coming out of the blue. We've all been through car washes. I don't know exactly how that part works.
Speaker: The only difference is, is with a car wash, you get pulled through and with these type, those large trucks, they can't be pulled through. So they're not on conveyor systems. So we have to rely upon the driver to kind of go the right speed. So they typically will just slow down and we'd like them going around between one foot per second and one mile per hour, which doesn't sound like a lot, but a mile per hour is about 50 % faster than a foot per second. But it's still, it's so slow that it's kind of like when you're going through a car wash, that speed. And that's where we try to let the guys or gals
Speaker: determine, okay, pretend you're going, getting pulled through a car wash, go that speed, which is usually just riding the clutch or putting it in a very low gear. Yeah. Well, it's a good reference point, at least for everyone to have. And also I assume makes the system a lot cheaper when you know you have someone drive. It removes a lot of the maintenance because if you talk to anybody with a car wash, their biggest maintenance headache is.
Speaker: that conveyor system, that and brushes typically. And since there is really no way to use brushes on feed trucks, they're such an irregular shaped vehicle that a brush just wouldn't work. So all of those have to be touchlessly cleaned anyways. So you remove the two biggest maintenance items and this biosecurity system then can keep running
Speaker: for years and years and years. There's nothing moving. Moving parts are what wears down. And since we're able to station it all in one place and let the truck move, it's got really good bearings, you know, they're designed to roll and let them go through it. It virtually eliminates the maintenance, which is the, our biggest concern when we're selling one of these automated systems is because there's one thing about if a car wash goes down and it's down for a day or two.
Speaker: You might have a dirty car for a couple of days. If a biosecurity wash goes down for a day or two, it could be potentially millions of birds or swine, or now we're finding with the dairy cattle, it could them that you're losing production. So it could be so costly that you can't really afford to be down in the biosecurity industry. You can't afford to be down for an hour, let alone a day or a week.
Speaker: What kind of maintenance do these systems have? I'm guessing they, you have to swap out chemicals and stuff like that and refills, but what else is kind of involved with that? There's not a whole lot. Okay. Primarily what we've tried to do with at least our basic sanitizing system that these are just a sanitizer arch. And with them, we've got a one 10 volt booster pump. We try to design it so that it can be used with any basic power. And it's a one 10 booster pump.
Speaker: so far knock on wood, they last close to 10 plus years and that's doing anywhere from 50 to 100.
Speaker: applications a day and they'll still go 10 plus years. There's very little maintenance with that. And that's about it. The photo eyes, you have to clean them off, but that's, it's literally wiping them down. We've eliminated so much of the maintenance and so much of the moving parts that it's virtually takes care of itself. The other thing that we like to do, at least with Hydrokem, we've got devoted account managers that will stop out at their facilities.
Speaker: every month and do 30 point inspections of the system just to make sure that if it is starting something starting to go, we're on it ahead of time. That's usually the easiest way to prevent
Speaker: Any downtime is to catch it before it breaks and kind of get your eyes on it. Make sure that all the nozzles are open and clear spraying correctly. So with that being said, there's very, very little maintenance. We also eliminated all of the proprietary parts. So everything could be purchased typically at a local plumbing supply or an ag supply facility that's got spraying nozzles, things like that, which is at most of your TSCs and stuff like that.
Speaker: So literally, if you went into a TSC, you could practically replace everything on it. And a farmer, most farmers or people that work on these at these feed mills are more than qualified to be able to do any of the fixes because there are some of the most ingenuity of people in the industry. So when they fix stuff, they always fix it and they usually do it right the first time. So they're able to usually keep them up and running. We've never had really any instances.
Speaker: where it's been dire red flags go up and people are being sent out around the country because farmers are, they can figure it out. Well, that's great. Because you always want to do maintenance on your schedule, right? You never want to do it when a machine is broken. But if something does happen, it's nice to know that you can get parts and things immediately without having to wait for stuff to be shipped to you and all that stuff.
Speaker: Right. With the sale of anything, give a parts list, fair parts list and say, these are what we suggest you. And these are the minimum quantities that you should have on hand. Now it's not real big, but it would usually just fit into a toolbox that they can have directly right at the facility to swap out any of the nozzles, any diaphragms, things like that. They can get it back up and running immediately and then kind of have a minimum quantity in that box where when it falls below, all right, we need to add two more nozzles to it.
Speaker: It's always kept up. And if that's there, there's no reason that that system should be down. You mentioned these kind of optical eyes, which I'm guessing cameras that watch the truck as they go through. Is a lot of the system pretty automated then? Do people just kind of pull up, it sees a vehicle come and then it starts up by itself?
Speaker: Correct. So, and you said it kind of their cameras, they're not cameras. They're more just like on your garage door. When it detects something there, the garage door goes back up and says, don't go down. There's a kid standing there. That's, that's what we use. They're a little bit, the ones that are garage door are very basic. These are designed so that they can see through water and a lot of things like that. The only thing they can't see through is.
Speaker: something solid, like a piece of steel. And it's pretty simple. We use a micro PLC, which is a programming logic controller. So they're, what it is is you can program different things in there. Now, depending upon, cause we can design them to meet anybody's needs. Okay. So some people just want them set at the entrance of a facility and they just more or less put an awning over the top of it to keep it from getting wet. And with that being said, there's a photo eye as they pull up to it, it turns on.
Speaker: They drive through it, it turns off fairly simple. Other places, as we start to get more advanced, they'll pull up and there's access control on a small building where they might put your RFID badge. So they'll actually scan an RFID badge or it scans an RFID on the vehicle, which then tells
Speaker: an access control system okay this vehicle is here open the doors to the facility sort of automatically open the entrance door in the exit door the vehicle then drives through and as they're through it automatically closes the door on the facility so that's as it starts to get a little bit more advanced not they're not all like that. And then then they go all the way up to what we say is our.
Speaker: are full automated where we've got, we're putting detergent on the vehicle, undercarriage, an extensive undercarriage wash, and then the sanitizer application. And with those ones, typically there's an access control or a touch button panel out front where the driver can just press what type of wash they want. So they might want a full wash and sanitize.
Speaker: or they might want just an undercarriage rinse and sanitize, or they might just want sanitized. So they can select those different options as they're doing it. The one thing that's always typically done at those facilities is sanitize no matter what, you're going to get sanitized, but we've got some very large customers and they will have their trucks go through and actually get washed once a week.
Speaker: But that same truck might be sanitized five times a day. So they'll go through and get an undercarriage blast and sanitized, or they might just drive through and get sanitized, but they'll only get washed once just to make sure their fleet looks good. But then they get the rest of the different applications. So there's countless ways that it can be automated to meet the client's needs and what they're looking for. Yeah. And that's a little site benefit of having your fleet look a lot, a lot nicer.
Speaker: company spend a lot of money to get decals and stuff on the side of those feed trucks. It's nice to, if people could see them on the road. Well, that's huge and the maintenance benefits of it, I think outweigh a lot of the other parts, especially we're located up here in Michigan, but I know that Iowa, I mean, a lot of the Midwest is in areas where there's a lot of salt and corrosives on the road and the winter.
Speaker: And those just eat up expensive vehicles. So by just rinsing the undercarriages of them off extends the life and the maintenance costs go way down when you actually do that. So it's kind of a twofold and we always kind of say, if you're putting in something automated already, you might as well add a couple other things to it. And then you can use it for a lot more purposes than just sanitizing. You can actually keep your fleet looking great as well. Yeah. And definitely cheaper than bringing it to like some kind of truck washing place and stuff. If you want to keep your.
Speaker: vehicles cleaned while I'm a Wisconsin boy myself. So well aware of the salty roads in the winter. Yeah. And that's in a lot of the times when you, they do take them to these truck washes, it's usually a minimum of 45 minutes. And I've heard up to two hours waiting. And then it usually takes around a half an hour when you're in there. So to have to pay a driver that amount of time to sit there, or if they own their own, it usually takes around three minutes to pull through a full size truck wash. And usually it costs somewhere on the range of
Speaker: $10 or so for them to completely have it washed, undercarriage rinsed really effectively, which doesn't get done at a truck wash because they can't really do it by hand, and then sanitized for 10 bucks, they're looking at probably close to $150 to have somebody do it for you. So it can definitely create a return on the investment pretty quickly to automate that process.
Speaker: Yeah. And you're not afraid to do it more often. Finding time and cash for that kind of stuff on a busy schedule is never easy. People like examples. So do you have any facilities you've worked on recently that you've put in a new system for that has a good story? Yeah. I mean, we've got a lot of them and it's public information out there.
Speaker: We work with Cooper Farms over in Ohio, and we've got four different facilities out there. And two of them, they've got two large full -size truck washes with the sanitizer application. And then they've got at their feed mills, at a couple of the small satellite feed mills, they've got the, just the sanitizer applications. So that no matter where that truck is moving, they can make sure that it's being sanitized, inappropriate, kind of appropriate timeframes. So that they're real big.
Speaker: JFS milling has got a couple of them down in Southern Indiana there. That one was interesting. There was a large outbreak in 2015 and it was literally all around our property. So that was a kind of, we knew that we were doing something right when the farms around, I mean, within the same County got hit, but the ones that had a biosecurity wash there, which was JFS did not have it actually impact theirs. So we knew we were on the right track.
Speaker: They've actually got one now that's going on 20 years and they're going to be replacing it shortly. And that's probably the life cycle of most of our washes is going to be about that 20 year point at which you're going to end up needing to probably replace it, which is good because a lot of technology changes in 20 years. It's pretty universal for most equipment. I guess after 20 years, they're almost always a different beast entirely. I mean, you need to, it's something that.
Speaker: The industry seems, at least here in the US, I know it's a lot more over in Europe and things. There are a lot more stringent about this stuff, but here I visit a lot of feedmills. I think I've been to one with a truck washing system and that's just.
Speaker: At this point, it's something that the industry really needs to start investing in. And like I said, it's like, just the advantage is to tell your customers, Hey, it's an avian, you know, avian influence out there, but we're good. We're, we're sanitized over here. Buy from us. It just seems like a good, good idea to me. Right. And then, and we've also been working with Daybreak on a lot of theirs and primarily what we've been helping them out with.
Speaker: was with the smaller sanitizer application systems. And it's kind of a unique situation. They ended up purchasing a bunch of
Speaker: other smaller egg farms. And when they ended up purchasing it, they ended up purchasing one that we had sold a system to and they got to it and they were like, this is perfect. This is exactly, we've been looking for this, but we didn't know where to get it. And so since that point, they've used that as the standard at their facilities moving forward, which is great. And I'm proud to be a part of kind of stepping up their biosecurity game and.
Speaker: I appreciate the trust that they give to us on that because it is a big responsibility. We've been taking care of a lot of the daybreak ones and we're moving forward with other ones, Fremont Farms and things like that. So Tyson, Smithfield, there's a lot of large companies out there that are taking it seriously and implementing new things.
Speaker: And like you said, it's not just poultry anymore, right? Like they might, integrated poultry mills might be the leader in this, but with these diseases spreading to all types of species, I mean, it's getting more and more important to just have this as a standard part of your facility. Are there any other future kind of trends, advancements that you're seeing out there that you think might be implemented in the next couple of years or just a way that you see this part of the industry progressing? Right. And even if you owned a million.
Speaker: Well, Cooper farms, for instance, they own all their own feed mills and they've got pigs and turkeys and chickens. So for them, it's a all inclusive, we're going to take care of our own. It isn't even as much about, Hey, come get our feed as it is. We have to protect our own flock and the pigs and things like that. And it's usually the piglets that are the most susceptible, but getting the piglets safe. And it's actually the young birds too. I mean,
Speaker: So those are their largest or most locked down facilities and to really step into Cooper's because they've been on the forefront of it for a long time. And they've set an industry standard that is incredible because they've been taking it seriously for close to 20 years and how they design their facilities with the green and the red zones and gray zones, which is farm dirty. And I've got most of my knowledge from working with the Cooper farms people and how they have
Speaker: done it and really established a routine. There's some companies out there that are just incredible and hats off to them and everybody's playing catch up. The nice thing that I've always said about a lot of these places, but I'll tell somebody, Hey, I've got somebody that's looking at implementing a similar
Speaker: process your, do you mind if I share the drawings of your facility with them? And this is not just Cooper's, but them in particular for this point, they're always willing to give out and say, no, let them see what we've got. If they're able to come up with something better, great, but it's great for the industry to bring up their game. So it isn't a separation. It's not, it's people working together within all of the farms, even though you might be a competitor, it's
Speaker: brings up because if one farm down the road gets a flock that gets sick, there's a real good chance your flocks going to get sick. And then also if they get sick, there's kill zones and you might lose your flock when you had nothing to do with it. So for them, it's all encompassing. Let's bring the entire industry to a point at which we no longer have to worry about it anymore. It's created camaraderie, which I just love about farmers in general, say,
Speaker: us and not a me or an I type mentality. If anyone has any more questions for you or anything like that, where should they go? Where should they get more information? You can always go to our website. It's hydrochemsystems .com. We've got a spot on our webpage for biosecurity specifically. You can also email us. Our basic inbox is sales at hcsclean .com.
Speaker: It would end up getting to the proper person or you can contact me directly. I would say that I've got a team of sales engineers that are prepared to be able to design and work with people. However, I do have the most experience and I oversee all of the designs anyways. So you can also just get ahold of me. And my name is Keith and it's K E I T H at hcs clean .com is my email address.
Speaker: Shoot me an email and I'd be more than happy to kind of discuss your specific situation and what might be a solution to your issue and make something that's high on your mind to something that you don't even think about anymore. Yeah, that's great. And much of that information will be linked in the show description right below. And thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me and the listeners today, Keith. And for everyone out there, thank you so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe.
