Algae had a prominent focus at the recent Alltech conference in downtown Lexington — a conference that addressed the challenges of feeding an exploding world population.
The microorganism that grows in preponderance in wet places around the planet has become an important component of Alltech’s strategy. Alltech grows massive quantities of heterotrophic algae, which can be grown in the dark, under controlled conditions at its facility in Winchester, Ky. Algae biomass, abundant in oil, has been integrated into the company’s nutrient-rich feeds for livestock, poultry, aquaculture and pet food, and the company’s research into algae’s promising potential is ongoing.
One of the speakers at the conference, Kyle Raney, who has worked extensively with Alltech’s algae program, told Business Lexington that Alltech’s core competency is with yeast.
Thirty-three years ago, Dr. Pearse Lyons founded Alltech with yeast as a primary focus, because of its nutrients and other beneficial attributes for animal health. Alltech has a slew of products made with yeast components, and Raney said there are hundreds of yeast strains to work with. Alltech began studying algae about six years ago, and in 2010, the company acquired the former Martek algae plant in Winchester. Raney said that algae strains number in the thousands, with variations of content that offer up a smorgasbord of nutrients.
“You can even take one specific strain and grow it in three different ways,” said Raney. “One way may produce oil, another proteins, another lipids or fats. Any given vitamins can be found in different species. There is such variety.”
Alltech has a database with about 500 strains of algae, said Raney, and at any given time, active research is being conducted on five to 10 of them.
“It could be very simple research to just see if we can get it to grow,” he said, “or very detailed research to see what it can produce and to see if it can be done economically, scaleable to large production.”
At Alltech in Winchester, six final-stage fermenters — three 265,000-liter tanks, two 149,000-liter tanks and one 90,000-liter tank — produce the algae biomass rich in nutrients. It takes just nine days to produce 20 tons of algae biomass from one final-stage fermenter.
The fermentation starts at laboratory scale in a cryovial and moves up the ladder through larger and larger fermenters until harvest time from the final-stage fermenters.
The tremendous yield of highly nutritious biomass using a mere 100,000 square feet, the facility’s size, shows efficient land use. To give an idea of the potential algae holds for agriculture, the Alltech website states that an “acre of Chlorella algae can produce as much protein as 21 acres of soybeans, 49 acres of corn, 95 acres of wheat or 994 acres of barley.”
All of the oil-rich algae biomass produced in Winchester goes into Alltech products.
“There are several algae products that are produced out of the plant,” said Raney. “The main product is made through a patented process and contains high levels of oil, up to 70 percent, and DHA.”
DHA is a valued Omega-3 Fatty Acid that supports brain and eye development, cognitive health and general immunity. DHA is typically added to the food chain by the use of fish oil. With the global issues of overfishing and mercury contamination, DHA produced from a closed system deriving it directly from algae can assure buyers of product quality and purity.
When Alltech acquired the Winchester facility, it came with a pilot plant. The pilot plant is a scaled-down version of the production system, and it allows for ongoing research and experimentation to evaluate different algae strains and study different production processes before taking them to a commercial level. It appears that algae is quickly growing to become a part of Alltech’s core competency — a competency to help agriculture meet pressing challenges now and in the time ahead.