Optimisation is a keyword that bounces inside every fish farmer's head. Nowadays, more than ever, fish farmers seek to optimise every single aspect of their businesses, a motivation that is imposed by the increased competitiveness within the fish farming industry.
This pressure is particularly felt in the EU, where aquaculture production has been stagnant in terms of volume (FAO, 2020) and generally subjected to global fish price reductions (e.g., seabream and seabass).
This means that, in order to keep businesses running with attractive profits, fish farmers are continuously restructuring their operations, seeking optimisation and efficient production. Looking into the different manageable resources and operations of a fish farm, feeding is usually the one process that represents the greatest weight in the cash outflow, accounting for 30-60 percent of total operational costs. Thus, feeding is one of the main resources and operations that have been targeted for optimisation.
In the past few years, the aquaculture industry has seen significant advances with regard to feeding optimisation. These advances have been made at multiple levels, covering areas that span from nutrition to operation monitoring, e.g., feeds formulated based on more precise nutritional requirements and use of underwater cameras to assist in feeding operations. More recently, this industry has seen the emergence of decision-support tools that leverage the potential of mathematical algorithms. Examples include tools based on mechanistic mathematical models that describe fish growth, feed conversion and waste production, therefore showing great potential to support feeding optimisation activities. Although these types of tools have been used by the scientific community since the 90’s (e.g., Conceição et al., 1998; Lupatsch and Kissil, 1998; Nobre et al., 2019), only recently did they become available to be used by non-modelling experts and generalised for fish farmers.
Read more, HERE.
The Aquaculturists
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