Alltech Tackles Feeding Fish that Feed Humanity

Alltech, the global biotechnology company based in Jessamine County, made its name by producing food additives for cows, horses, swine, poultry and dogs.

But the company hopes to take its knowledge of land animals and see whether the same all-natural products can benefit fish and shrimp raised by man around the world.

A year ago, Alltech, the corporate sponsor for the 2010 FEI World Equestrian Games in Kentucky, opened a $1 million aquaculture center up the road from its Nicholasville headquarters.

Alltech is interested in aquaculture -- the controlled rearing of aquatic animals and plants -- because it could mean a boatload of new revenue for a company that already reaps nearly $400 million in worldwide sales.

Much of the world's ocean fish stocks of tuna, cod, pollock and other species are at their limit of production or are on the decline because of over-fishing.

Meanwhile, the United States imports $11 billion worth of seafood each year, and exports about $3 billion, said Ewen McLean, a Virginia Tech researcher who will join Alltech in February to head the aquaculture center. "We can't produce the amount of fish and seafood that we need for ourselves," he said.

Worldwide "there is going to be a need by 2030 for another 37 million tons of fish," McLean said. "That's not going to come from commercial fisheries because most are over-fished already. So the only place that can come from is aquaculture."

To sustain the world's current level of protein from seafood means that fish will have to be raised on farms and ranches, many of them indoors. For example, several Virginia companies plan to raise millions of pounds of fish at indoor facilities, McLean said.

The Nicholasville research has implications for Kentucky, too, where the seasonal raising of shrimp, catfish, hybrid striped bass and tilapia is done mostly in outdoor ponds.

Over the last 10 years, Kentucky aquaculture has grown from about 10 acres of water surface area to more than 600, said Angela Caporelli, a coordinator with the state Department of Agriculture. One indoor facility for marine shrimp is starting up in Ohio County.

"Aquaculture is a great opportunity here to make up some of the lost income from tobacco," Caporelli said.

Alltech's research -- evaluated independently by Kentucky State University in Frankfort and elsewhere -- indicates that its products have some benefit for shrimp and fish.

For example, an Alltech yeast extract called NuPro "produced the largest shrimp in Texas" when it was used as an alternative protein, McLean said.

Another Alltech product called Bio-Mos seems to have cut down the incidence of disease in shrimp raised in the Philippines and Thailand, he said.

The Nicholasville aquaculture center is studying the effects of Alltech products on Nile tilapia, a freshwater fish that is farm-raised around the world. Eventually, the company will do research on shrimp, trout, salmon and other species.

The company-made additives are fed three times a day to the tilapia as they grow from fingerlings to adults. As they grow, they are moved to increasingly larger tanks, from 100 gallons, then 250 gallons and finally to 1,500 gallons, said Ben Shafer, manager of the aquaculture center.

"We have about 3,000 fish in here right now," Shafer said. "We could potentially do about 6,000 total, which is very low in terms of production. But we're not a production facility. We are a research facility. So our goal is not to produce a massive amount of fish. Our goal is to do quality research" for the benefit of fish farmers around the world".

Alltech is also applying the science of nutrigenomics -- the study of how foods interact with genes -- to promote better health in fish.

In the same way that scientists have put into proper sequence all 3 billion bits of human DNA, scientists have also mapped the genes of certain fish. It's possible to take those genes and put them onto a "microarray" -- an orderly arrangement of genes on a chip the size of a keyring fob -- that can be scanned by a laser to see which genes are turned on and to what degree.

These gene chips allow scientists to see how certain foods and nutrients turn on or turn off specific genes.

That means that diets can be tailored, say, to produce higher-quality fish eggs or to improve a fish's immunity to disease.

"It gives an advantage to an animal, and you're going to make money because you're going to enhance the welfare of the fish," McLean said.

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Alltech Tackles Feeding Fish that Feed Humanity