FERRIDAY, La. &045; It tastes a little like grain cereal, which is what it is, basically.

The hot soy meal that comes out of the crushers at Ferriday Oil and Seed, a new soybean processing plant in the Ferriday Industrial Park, is the less publicized product of the two made there, but it may be just as important as the plant’s primary product, the oil that’s extracted from the soybeans.

&uot;It’s kind of like peanuts without quite as much of that peanut flavor,&uot; LSU professor Gary Hay said as he munched on a bit of it.

Hay, Ferriday Mayor Gene Allen and Teresa Dennis, executive director of the Concordia Economic and Industrial Development District, were at the plant Tuesday to watch the operations of one of Ferriday’s newest businesses.

Hay, a dairy specialist with the LSU Extension Service, was in Natchez for some meetings this week and swung by the new plant to see the operation and collect some samples for testing at LSU’s labs in Baton Rouge.

Ferriday Oil and Seed has been in operation for several weeks, though owner Gary Thornton said they temporarily shut down production in order to realign some equipment to make it run more efficiently.

The soy meal, the byproduct of processing the beans for oil, is used as a animal feed and is particularly prized for its high protein and fat content.

&uot;The meal byproduct from the oil process is a good animal feed and a really good cattle feed,&uot; Hay said. &uot;Dairy producers feed a lot of soybean meal to their cattle for a protein source. It’s the gold standard. The higher fat means they don’t have to add as much fat back into the feed as they would with other products.&uot;

The process to make meal is surprisingly simple, though the machinery used to do it is both expensive and complex.

Soybeans enter the crushers, where they are heated to approximately 312 degrees, then crushed by a revolving screw. From there, the crushed beans go to an extruder, which further crushes them and catches the oil that is released.

That oil will become biodiesel fuel and other energy products.

The meal goes into a separate bin for storage and is put in bags for shipping.

Ferriday Oil and Seed will provide a local source for cattle producers to secure feed. And since the soybeans are grown in the area, the plant is in Ferriday and there are plenty of buyers in Louisiana and Mississippi, the entire market will stay in the area.

&uot;I think it’s a major milestone for Louisiana,&uot; Hay said. &uot;It’s something we need here. We have a lot of cattle producers that will really like having this here.&uot;

Thornton said he has gotten more requests for feed than he can fill. The meal, which comes in one-ton bags, is enough to feed several hundred cows for one day, Hay said.