Less soy, more rapeseed meal in EU

While the sunflower and soybean harvests fell last year due to the drought, the canola crop increased by nearly 15% year-on-year to 19.6 million tons. In the same period, the production of oilseed meal in the EU is also expected to reach a record level with a production of 30.5 million tons. As a result, oilseed meal imports are forecast to decline by 4.6% to 18.7 million tonnes. This is primarily due to the fact that in 2022-2023 the import of soybean meal decreased by 4% to 16 million tons. By the way, there is a lot of animal feed research going on in the EU to replace imported soy using, for example, rapeseed. In the research project that took place between 2017 and 2022 in Germany, the native ethanol extraction of peeled rapeseed was developed - with gentler processing than traditional methods. Traditionally, hexane is used for extraction at high temperature and pressure, but the new process, called EthaNa, uses ethanol to extract the oil. The maximum temperature reached is ...