09/10/2013: Lowering the fish-to-fish ratio in feed

In order to use fish feeds most efficiently, Cooke Aquaculture is relying on a combination of fish behaviour and underwater cameras.

At the week-long 2013 World Seafood Congress, hosted by the Fisheries and Marine Institute of MUN in St John.s Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, Ross Butler, senior vice-president of the New Brunswick-based company Cooke Aquaculture, told a panel centred on seafood profitability that underwater camera systems developed by Dr Kang Pee Ang are now used by companies around the world.

“He takes this technology and trains all of our fish-growing people on our farms to use and to understand the behaviour of the fish: when they’re hungry, when they’re not — so feeding, stop feeding and so on,” he said.

“Our feed specialist Alan Donkin conducts feed trials on all alternative feed ingredients to reduce our reliance on fish ingredients.

“While the health and welfare of our fish requires that we include quality fishmeal and oil in the diets, we’ve been able to reduce our reliance, in the last 10 years, by over 70 per cent. Fishmeal and oil now only makes up 15 to 20 percent of our product.”
Cooke’s feed division provides the company almost 80 per cent of its feed, with the rest coming from international manufacturers.

The work has helped Cooke get its feed-to-fish ratio — the number of kilograms of feed required to produce one kilogram of fish — down to 1.2 kilos of food to produce one kilo of fish, reports Daniel MacEacherb for thetelegram.com (Twitter: @TelegramDaniel )

“Ongoing improvements are continuously moving that number closer to 1.1,” he said. 

“If you compare that to land-based (animals), most of the poultry in the world today is well-documented at about two kilograms of food to produce one kilo. Pork is somewhere in the 3.5 range and it ranges plus or minus depending on the countries that you look at. And for cattle, that’s upwards of eight kilograms of food to produce one kilo.”

Salmon are efficient at converting food to energy because they’re cold-blooded and therefore don’t require energy to stay warm.

“We harvest them before maturity, so you’re not wasting energy on reproduction,” said Mr Butler.
Read the original story at ...