Aquaculture - Aquaculture Nutrition

 

Background/Context

The aquaculture industry was valued at 275 billion USD in 2019. 91% of global aquaculture is farmed in Asia; China accounted for 57% of global production while the rest of Asia made up 34%.

The growth of aquaculture in Southeast Asia has been 5.7% over the last 10 years and has immense potential to continue growing in the future. However, there are also multiple limitations that prevent further growth of the industry.

Diets in the aquaculture industry have changed significantly over the last number of years. From a sustainability perspective, there is a need to manage fish meal and fish oil use in aquaculture feeds. As feed ingredients are derived from many different sources, significant planning, research and development can lead to more sustainable, economical and responsible feed solutions.

Objective

The most important challenges for producers in the aquaculture industry are to:

•  Produce healthy fish in the most sustainable manner.
•  Reduce the reliance and proportion of marine ingredients in feeds.
•  Achieve rapid and efficient growth rates of their production animals.
•  Reduce their operational costs and feed costs are typically >50% of production.

Solution

The solution is accurate assessment of farm production data. There is a lot of data available but we need more real time farm data analysis that wires up and takes into account the many factors impacting growth rate and feed conversion efficiency, such as feed formulation (novel ingredients), pellet type, species and life stage, etc.

•  What software solutions can identify the impacts of particular feed ingredients on the performance of farmed fish and shrimp during varied farming conditions?



Possible Solution

Monitoring: Use of software solutions to connect with relevant hardware (aeration/oxygenation systems, feed distribution systems, water quality sensors, etc) to wire up and help manage a farming operation and measure performance of particular feed ingredients within feeds for farmed fish and shrimp and separate that from the impacts of the culture system.