In this Feed & Grain Chat, Ryan Whipkey, director of global product for Envirologix, outlines how feed mills can develop effective pre-harvest mycotoxin testing strategies by assessing high-risk ingredients and suppliers, establishing sampling plans, training staff with clear SOPs and avoiding common pitfalls to ensure grain safety and quality.
Transcript of interview with Ryan Whipkey, director of global product, Envirologix:
Elise Schafer, editor, Feed & Grain: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Feed & Grain Chat. I'm your host, Elise Schafer, editor of Feed & Grain. This edition of Feed & Grain Chat is brought to you by WATT Global Media and FeedandGrain.com. FeedandGrain.com is your source for the latest news, product and equipment information for the grain handling and feed manufacturing industries.
Today I'm joined by Ryan Whipkey, director of global product for Envirologix. He's here to share his expertise on developing a pre-harvest mycotoxin testing strategy for feed mills. Hi Ryan, thanks for joining me today.
Ryan Whipkey, director of global product, Envirologix: Hi, thank you for having me.
Schafer: Of course! What are the most important factors to consider when identifying high risk ingredients before harvest?
Whipkey: To identify high risk ingredients, the following should be considered. First is to think about the inclusion rate. So we're going to want to focus on high inclusion rate ingredients.
And then for those high inclusion rate ingredients, we next want to decide and make an assessment on what is the likelihood of contamination. We can use a couple of resources to help us make that assessment. Regulatory bodies, such as the FDA, will call out specific ingredients that have a specific mycotoxin risk. So for example, the FDA calls out Fumonisin being high risk for corn and corn byproducts.
So, if you're following your local regulatory body, they can give you some clues about the ingredients that are going to be high risk. There's other publications as well from the industry. So, you can use the the Cargill World Mycotoxin Report to get a global view on what everyone else in the industry is testing, what toxins are being found in these commodities and by region to help you localize and define your risk for these high risk, high inclusion ingredients. And then something else that I think should be done with the industry is thinking about your supplier risk.
And this is really for folks that have a track record where they're using similar suppliers or growers year after year and they have about two to three years of data. So, you can look back at the data and start to understand with your suppliers, how are they performing year over year? Can we look at them and think about their risk profile and use that information to inform our sampling plan and our testing plan?
Schafer: How should feed mills determine the appropriate sampling frequency and sample size for pre-harvest mycotoxin testing?
Whipkey: So it starts with the assessment of what ingredients are high risk and also what suppliers are high risk. And if you're relatively new to testing and you don't have the track record of data, then I think you'd want to really keep it simple to start. So focus on those high risk ingredients that make up a major percent of the ration and have high risk. So corn stands out as that high risk ingredient and then we need to collect some initial data since we haven't done that in the past.
Using the same testing plan across all your suppliers keeps it really simple for the receiving team. And what you could do for new crop is to implement a skip lot testing plan. So that could look like testing every fifth truck. That's a good balance of keeping things efficient regarding taking in the grain and and managing the queue of trucks. And then what you'd want to test for, you could do a local or regional risk assessment in the sense of, in my growing climate, in my growing growing area, am I more likely to have aflatoxin because it was a drought year followed by high heat and high humidity? Or am I more in a moist, cool climate where other toxins such as DON are more prevalent? Initially starting, if you have no data and you haven't done those assessments and you don't have the historical data, testing for the most common toxins like Aflatoxin and Fumonisin is a good place to start.
And you could do the skip lot testing plan for about three weeks and you're going to be charting that data over those three weeks and evaluating the levels versus the key levels that are laid out in your food safety plan. And then you can make and a decision on should I escalate, can I deescalate, are there certain suppliers that I should manage more closely, but really letting the data inform your control plan and your testing plan is the best way to do it and to determine that sampling frequency.
Schafer: Now, how can feed meals best prepare and train their staff to ensure reliable and accurate results for their safety plans?
Whipkey: Best practice is to create standard operating procedures (SOPs) that are linked to your food safety plan. Make sure that they're very visible in the sense of visual instructions, so pictures on how to operate a probe, the probing pattern that you might use when you're collecting a sample, how much sample to collect — the the industry guidance is between five to 10 pounds — how to properly run a grinder, grinding the entire sample, homogenizing it, subsampling, how to run the tests for the toxins that are high risk, then what to do with the results. Your mycotoxin test vendor can help you with a lot of the training materials.
A lot of this is already prepared by the vendors themselves. They can also give you some tips and tricks on how to maintain calibration of their equipment as well as the grinding equipment and equipment commonly found in the probe stand. Another thing to do is hands-on training and competency checks. So, pre-harvest every year before taking a new crop, you'll want to conduct an annual or refresher training and you'll want to include some blind check samples in that to prove proficiency.
And you'll want to keep a record of these training events in case you get audited. So again, you can work with your vendor on what type of training, what specific training would need to be implemented to run the test, as well as materials that can be helpful, such as videos and check samples are often sold as accessories, as well. I think importantly too, you you want to work with your operators at the receiving shack to help them understand why you're doing things the way you're doing them, so as not to rush through. It's really about feed safety and productivity and bottom line impact to the business.
So probing could often be skipped over, so you'd really want to take the time to help them understand why we need to get a representative sample. And it's around the hotspot phenomenon. In some cases, say aflatoxin in corn, it's known that a minority of the corn can make up a majority of the contamination. So, really doing a good job with getting representative sample is critical to have accurate information for your quality management system.
And then finally, you're going to need to train your operators on what to do with the information. Are we going to do any rejection, any segregation, any discounting? And and also help your operators understand that the testing plan may change over time based on the results. We're trying to minimize the amount of burden on the operator while also protecting the end product quality and driving good animal productivity and feed efficiency.
So, those are the things that need to be balanced. It's the the operational complexity, but while also minimizing the cost to do so while maximizing the product quality.
Schafer: Now, what are the most common mistakes feed mills make when developing a pre-harvest mycotoxin testing strategy and how can they be avoided?
Whipkey: Under the pressure of a long queue of trucks, there can be some shortcuts that get taken by some of the operators, with the intention of trying to be efficient. So that could include not getting a representative sample, which is really critical and a major driver of getting reliable information. A kind of error proofed way, but has a little bit of expense, would be to invest in an automated truck sampler or probe. So that way you can't take a non-representative sample because it's hard coded into the into the machine itself. Not everyone has the ability to do that, so if you're not able to make that investment, the next best thing would be to have those clear s SOPs and regular training. And then some unannounced audits to ensure that operators are following through.
Some other areas to check on would include the grinding equipment. So this should be part of your pre-harvest tune-up, if you will, or included in the training and running the results, we'll want to check the the grind quality because blades do get dull over our time. So, you'll want to use a 20 mesh sieve to qualify your grind and make sure that it's at the right particle size because that will impact the extraction efficiency of some of the mycotoxins.
And then I think something else that sometimes gets overlooked is the importance of communicating with your suppliers. Helping them understand, if you're implementing testing, why you're implementing those tests and what to expect as the season goes on and helping them understand what their quality is over time, as well, and sharing some of the best practices from some of the suppliers that do things that may help mitigate mycotoxins. So for example, in wheat, it's known that during the flowering process, it's very susceptible to the fungal infection, so you can apply fungicide when it's flowering, and that has been shown to significantly decrease DON. So if you have suppliers that are having success year after year, learning from them and then helping your other suppliers to adopt those practices is something that I think would be appreciated by your suppliers. You know, it's really a partnership and we want to ensure that there's quality grain coming in and helping your suppliers understand why you're testing and what they could do better, I think would go a long way.
Schafer: Well, thank you for breaking that down and sharing your insights with us today, Ryan.
Whipkey: Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me.
Schafer: Well, that's all for today's Feed & Grain Chat. If you'd like to see more videos like this, subscribe to our YouTube channel, sign up for the Industry Watch daily eNewsletter, or go to FeedandGrain.com and search for videos. Thanks again for watching, and we hope to see you next time!