With my own eyes

(Photo: Yuri Feklistov )

The Liskinsky creamery is considered the largest in the Voronezh region. There are two large workshops for processing sunflower and soybeans. True, the latter, designed to process 500 tons of soybeans per day, is often idle - Russia has little of its own soybeans, except that sometimes American is thrown in as part of various technical assistance programs. “Somehow we received 60 thousand tons, albeit on good terms - we processed, sold and paid suppliers, but this year there were only 45 thousand tons,” says plant director Alexander Dubovoy. “And we need 120 thousand tons a year ".

The sunflower plant can process 400-450 tons per day. When the seeds are delivered, they are first checked in the laboratory and then prepared for long-term storage: garbage is selected, dried and sent to elevator warehouses. Storage is a delicate matter: the seeds must be dry and free of impurities. Otherwise, all this goodness may deteriorate: cake or, even worse, oxidize. Therefore, the elevator should be dry and cool - while the seeds are waiting there in the wings, they are blown with air (active ventilation).

Walking through the plant, we saw these same elevators - huge buildings. Approximately at the level of the fourth floor, the elevator building is connected to the production building by something like a passage. In fact, inside this “transition” there is a conveyor that delivers seeds from the elevator directly to processing. It begins with “hulling” - the seeds first fall into devices that clean them from the husks, then into winches - special sieves through which the kernels go into one container, the husks into another, and the unpeeled ones (it is not possible to peel all the seeds at once, there are up to 12 % husks) - in the third. What is not cleaned is put back into the process of collapsing. Already here you can feel the slight smell of sunflower seeds, and the further you walk through the plant, the stronger it is. In general, after looking at the technological process of extracting oil, you begin to understand the threatening meaning of the saying “I will squeeze the oil out of you.”

The cleaned kernels end up on rolling machines, and there their torment continues: the seed is crushed, flattened - a so-called petal is obtained. The crushed seeds go into braziers - huge cylindrical cauldrons, 6-7 meters in diameter. It’s already really hot and noisy here, the cars groan, puff, and clang. The workers' faces were flushed and wet with sweat. And the smell of seeds becomes so thick and concentrated that at some point you stop distinguishing the nuances - it seems that it no longer smells of seeds, but simply of something fried, for example potatoes.

In fact, there is no frying as such: just the temperature in the frying pan is about 90 degrees, and the seeds are treated with hot steam. The mass that has been stewing in the fryer is already supplied to the presses, which squeeze out the oil. Golden-yellow, hot, it flows in separate streams into a long chute. We have already sniffed it so much that we almost don’t feel the aroma of the first squeezed oil. I even let out a careless “Oh, why doesn’t it smell like oil at all.” A woman working at this site in a T-shirt, sweatpants and slippers on her bare feet is indignant: “How can it not smell? It really smells!” He takes a metal mug, scoops oil from the chute with it and brings it to my face with the words: “Here it is, fragrant, clean, smell it.” Later, when we get into the car to drive back to Voronezh, our driver will sniff and say: “You smell like oil, you can immediately see where we’ve been.” And indeed, after wandering around the workshops for half an hour, all our clothes were so thoroughly saturated with the smell of fried seeds that they smelled slightly even the next morning.

It is not possible to squeeze out all the oil from the seeds by pressing - something always remains in the cake. Therefore, the cake goes on to extraction (a chemical process using, oddly enough, gasoline). In this way, it is possible to extract up to 98% of the oil contained in sunflower. This happens in a special apparatus that resembles a huge thick column, where the newly crushed cake is first mixed with gasoline, and then this mixture goes for distillation (evaporation of gasoline). We were not allowed to photograph this stage of production - they say it is not allowed for safety reasons. Gasoline is removed in three to four stages. Oil obtained in this way cannot be immediately consumed as food - it is technical. And to make it edible, several more stages of purification, rotation, deodorization, etc. are necessary. Nevertheless, the oil obtained by extraction, as a rule, goes for further processing in fat factories.

After all the oil has been extracted from the seeds, meal remains, which is used as livestock feed and is especially valued due to its high protein content. So the Liskinsky plant sells the meal to peasants. The main volume of oil produced by the plant is supplied to fat factories, where it is used for the preparation of margarines, mayonnaise, etc.

The plant has two more refining workshops, however, one of them has been idle for three years due to a strong reduction in demand for refined oil from canning factories. And what goes directly to the consumer market is packaged in plastic bottles. For this purpose, they specially purchased an Italian packaging line with a capacity of 20 tons of oil per day.

The main problem for this enterprise, as for many others, remains the purchase of raw materials in sufficient quantities. True, recently the situation has begun to improve: according to the director, the introduction of duties on the export of sunflower seeds has borne fruit - now peasants are increasingly selling them to Russian factories. And the main owner of the plant, the Moscow Industrial Bank, which now owns a controlling stake (previously it was in the hands of Alfa Bank), is creating a holding company specializing in oil refining. Perhaps in the future they will be able to build a vertically integrated complex that will connect sunflower farmers, oil processing plants and the main consumers of their products - fat factories - into a single chain. Now, according to Alexander Dubovoy, circular processing has already been organized: the oil produced by his enterprise goes to one of the St. Petersburg fat plants, that is, guaranteed sales have appeared, and the payment system has normalized. “The problem of finding real money, which plagues similar enterprises, has already been solved,” says Mr. Dubovoy. “The prospects seem to be good, at least our owners not only own shares, but are interested in developing production.”


(Photo: Yuri Gavrilov )