Event: Aquaculture 2013 review

International Aquafeed’s Tom Blacker heads to the ‘music city’ for Aquaculture 2013

The World Aquaculture Society's popular event, Aquaculture 2013 took place in a downtown conference centre in the 'music city', Nashville, Tennessee between February 22-24, 2013. Roger Gilbert, proprietor of Perendale Publishers Ltd and Tom Blacker, marketing and sales and directories coordinator were exhibiting, along with hundreds of others in the main exhibition hall.

From early on the first morning, participants gathered in the main ballroom for the Opening and Plenary. The official Steering Committee’s opening address, the session moved to official awards, speeches and presentations with great enthusiasm and an optimistic note prevailed for the imminent event at large. Dr Edward Allison presented an interesting lecture on global warming and aquaculture. The beginning was fantastically impressive and Dr Allison's speech placed aquaculture superbly well in the context of global warming. Overlapping this was the expo and the seminar room the exhibition hall was alive with many visitors along long aisles with all kinds of stands, products, prize draws and publications.

From the first moment onwards, our stand in the centre of the exhibition hall had visitors interested to see and hear about our titles. We noticed a genuine interest in both the English and Español International Aquafeed issues on show. Regular readers gave great feedback and new readers had some insightful opinions. Hundreds of copies of our magazines were distributed, In fact, there were limits needed on the distribution so as to ensure participants over the entire event could receive copies!

The atmosphere was relaxed throughout the various areas and the food and drinks at some exhibitor's stands were a welcome opportunity to mingle and network. Some of our regular advertisers were in attendance and were very pleasant to meet indeed.

There were no shortage of academic seminars with question and answer all over three floors of a large conference centre; the ones we attended were fantastic and inspirational to spur us on to standards. I managed to find time to attend two. The first was an Alltech seminar entitled 'Successful fish oil sparing in white seabass feeds using saturated fatty acid-rich soy oil' on Friday and Reed Mariculture's Eric Henry presenting 'Practical rotifer culture for zebrafish facilities' on Saturday. Both were informative and interesting and provided good question and answer sessions. 

The presence of feed producers, academics, manufacturers and organisations all in the vibrant capital of Tennessee was truly unique and it exceeded our expectations of the value it would bring. The next aquaculture exhibition has to reach the high standards as this one!

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Roger Gilbert, Perendale Publishers Ltd mans the International Aquafeed stand at Aquaculture 2013