Fish hatcheries look for meal replacement

Finding a substitute for fish meal in fish diets hasn’t been easy and now it’s becoming more expensive.

For more than three decades researchers have experimented with feedstuffs like soybean meal, corn, barley and even marine processing waste to replace fish meal. Up until 2006, sustainability was the key issue, but economics has become increasingly more important in recent years.

“We expected an orderly transition from fish meal to plant protein concentrate,” said Ron Hardy, director of the University of Idaho Fish Culture Experiment Station in Hagerman. “We expected demand would drive supply. That’s all wrong now.”

Researchers began looking for fish meal substitutes in earnest after an El Nino event in the 1970s drastically reduced fish meal production and sent prices to historic highs. Protecting against catastrophic events was one goal, but so was protecting fish populations by not harvesting as many for fish meal.

While fish meal prices have remained relatively stable, prices are about 50 percent higher than just a few years ago. At the same time, the price of corn, soybeans, wheat and rice have soared within the last year.

The 30-year average price for corn is $2.50 a bushel. At the end of April that had climbed to $5.91 per bushel, and December futures contract are trading above $7 per bushel in Chicago now. Soybean meal has climbed from $230 to $350 per ton.

“It alters how you think about feeds and alternatives,” Hardy told aquaculture producers at the Idaho Aquaculture Producers annual meeting.

“I don’t think we have a protein shortage. I think we have the wrong protein in the wrong form and in the wrong place.”

In 2006, aquafeeds used 68 percent of the world’s supply of fish meal (3.724 million metric tons) and 88.5 percent of fish oil (835,000 million metric tons).

Aquafeeds production is expected to double within 10 years.

World demand for grains is expected to double by 2025, driven largely by an economic expansion in China that is fueling demand for more animal protein. China’s swine herd, for example, is expected to increase by 8 to 10 percent annually. With 650 million head in China compared to 250 million in the European Union and 108 million in the U.S., an annual increase of 10 percent is equal to about half of the U.S. production,

Chinese people typically eat about 45 percent of the meat consumed annually by Americans. Increasing that level to one comparable to the U.S. would require 227 million metric tons more of feedstuffs to feed the animals, which in turn would require an additional 27.5 million hectares of farmland to raise that feed. “There’s not much land to be converted,” Hardy said.

China already uses 3.3 million metric tons of fish meal annually in swine, poultry and fish diets. The country bought one-sixth of the world’s supply of fish meal in 2006. That’s back when fish meal was priced between $300 and $500 a ton, now it’s $850 to $1,200 a ton.

That’s why researchers are shifting from looking at how commodities such as corn or soybean meal can be substituted for fish meal to looking at how co-products from biofuel production may be.

Palatability and providing the right mix of nutrients have presented challenges when substituting corn or soybean meal for fish meal. Those become even more difficult when looking at something like dried distillery grains, a byproduct of ethanol production.

DDGs are 27 percent to 30 percent crude protein and that protein is highly digestible, but DDGs are limited in fish diets because of a high level of indigestible carbohydrates, Hardy said. However, there is some potential for including DDGs in grow out diets for tilapia, carp and catfish.

“We’re not just taking out fish meal,” Hardy said. “Fish meal is minerals, bioactive compounds, a lot of good things.”

Researchers are not even sure what all those “good things” are or why plant proteins can’t provide them. That’s why including a supplement protein made from marine processing plants is likely to be part of any fish meal replacement strategy.

Another issue is simply price. “The price of plant protein concentrate relative to fish meal will continue to be a problem,” he said.

But even if price were no object, it’s unlikely that fish meal can be completely eliminated from aquafeeds. “Fish meal will balance deficiencies in other alternatives, but it will be reserved for high end diets such as starter for fry and for transition diets,” Hardy said.

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Fish hatcheries look for meal replacement