Aquafeed Mill Capacity and Investment: Sizing the Line
How annual feed demand converts into tonnes per hour, extrusion lines, storage, energy cost and an indicative aquafeed mill investment.
An aquafeed mill is justified by volume and destroyed by utilisation. The question is never 'how big an extruder' but 'how many effective production hours will this line actually run'. Start with the feed mill capacity calculator.
Effective hours, not nameplate hours
Shifts, operating days and uptime after changeovers between pellet sizes and formulations decide the tonnes-per-hour requirement. A mill planned on nameplate hours arrives 20–30% short of demand in its first year.
The dryer is usually the bottleneck
In floating extruded aquafeed, dryer capacity, not extruder capacity, caps throughput — especially with high-moisture, high-oil formulations and small pellet sizes. Require both figures in every quotation, at your actual formulation and pellet mix.
Raw material working capital
Storage cover in days sets silo and warehouse sizing, and raw material spend dwarfs energy in the operating budget. Test the annual demand behind the mill with the feed consumption calculator and the feed budget calculator.
Energy and conversion cost
Extruded aquafeed typically consumes 80–140 kWh per tonne. At an unstable or expensive tariff that line decides whether milling in-house beats buying finished feed — check it against the energy cost calculator and the drivers in the aquaculture OPEX guide.
Does the investment stand up?
Compare mill CAPEX per installed tonne per hour against the delivered price of bought-in feed over the same horizon, using the CAPEX estimator, the commercial ROI calculator and the aquaculture CAPEX guide.
Then issue one specification
Formulation range, pellet sizes, target tonnage, moisture, packaging and utilities belong in a single brief — see the aquaculture RFQ guide — with offers normalised through the supplier comparison framework. Regional context: feed mill equipment in Brazil and tilapia farming in Zambia.
FishMatch Group is an independent aquaculture project sourcing and RFQ platform. We are not a fish farm, feed producer, equipment manufacturer, EPC contractor, lender, broker-dealer, investment advisor or financial advisor. Supplier and project partner outreach happens only after a commercial project brief is reviewed. Start with a human-reviewed RFQ.
Guides, calculators and country pages for this topic
Use the guides for the decision framework, the calculators for indicative numbers, and the country pages for local scope and cost context. FishMatch reviews every request by hand before any supplier is approached — directory and country pages are for research, not automatic matching.
Guides
Calculators
Where this fits in a real project
Every FishMatch project runs through the same five reviewed stages, from a first enquiry to comparable quotations. See the full buyer journey.