Fish welfare is at the core of fish nutrition

Aquaculture farmers around the world need to respond to the higher demand of seafood without compromising on nutritional values and sustainability of their fish feed. Cargill’s sustainable aquaculture program, SeaFurther™, aims to help them. As Cargill is part of an integrated global food system across multiple food value chains, it has a unique perspective on how to build solutions that last, balancing multiple and varied interests while also protecting the environment on land and in the ocean.

Fish farming is becoming increasingly important as an alternative source to meet the growing global demand for aquaculture. Fish farming has the potential to contribute to the sustainability of the seas, especially in an environment where natural fish stocks are declining due to human-induced causes such as overfishing, pollution and climate change. However, fish farming does not come without it’s complexities and challenges. One of the biggest problems to be solved is to protect the health and welfare of the fish in a way that does not pose a risk to the consumer and the environment. Feeding is a good starting point for solving this problem.

Analysing and managing the content, size, feeding amount and method of the feed used when feeding fish can provide significant contributions to the farmers in terms of fish health and welfare. Gareth Butterfield, Cargill Aqua Nutrition Strategic Marketing Technology Director, answered some questions about these issues.

In your opinion, what are the prerequisites for raising a healthy farmed fish? What is the place and importance of nutrition in healthy fish farming?
The health of farmed fish is intrinsically linked with the health of our planet, so we put fish welfare at the top of our agenda. We take time and care to develop fish nutrition that protects the lives of farmed fish and keeps them healthy.

This starts with ensuring we meet the nutritional needs of the farmed animal – the correct nutrients, at the correct time, size and for a given environment. When the animal comes under undue stress, much like in humans, it may be necessary to offer supplementary nutrition to combat disease, environmental challenges and stress.

Additives and functional feeds can be used to strengthen animals’ immune systems, reducing the need for medication like antibiotics. Last year, Cargill Aqua Nutrition saw functional feed sales reach their highest level since 2017, while antiparasitic and antibiotic drug sales fell significantly over the same time. At Cargill, we supply feed with antibiotics only on an as-needed basis for customers who have a prescription for the treatment. This has helped fuel a 71% reduction in coldwater antibiotic feed sales since 2017, helping to reduce the risk of developing anti-microbial resistance (AMR) in the environments where seafood is farmed.

What should be the most appropriate feeding to keep fish healthier and reduce mortality rates? For example, which feed ingredients should be preferred and how much should the feed quantity be?
The correct nutrients must be delivered to the animal to sustain maximum, healthy growth and optimum feed conversion ratios. Too little food can introduce excessive competition into the population, whilst too much can impact the immediate and surrounding culture environment through waste feed. Balancing these attributes will maintain fish health and help to manage mortality rates.

Feeding profiles in aquaculture will vary according to environment, geography, species, animal size and other variables. One common element is how the feeding profile changes over time. It is important to balance the nutrient profile for a given fish size, stage of life cycle, and environment. You also must ensure the nutrients are configured to deliver a high-quality feed that can be wholly consumed and utilised by the animal, can travel through the appropriate feed delivery system without losing integrity and have a minimal impact on the environment.

A great example of this can be found with Cargill’s Aquaxcel™ shrimp feed range, which comes in micro-pellets less than 1 millimeter in diameter. Made from high-quality raw materials and fortified with health-boosting vitamins and minerals, the pellets help the shrimp grow quickly, and support their immune system, especially in the crucial early development stages when mortality is high. Because Aquaxcel pellets leach less and take longer to dissolve, it is easier to control—and reduce—the amount of feed delivered to ponds. This, in turn, means cleaner water, less need for water treatment, healthier shrimp, and more revenue for the farmer. It is a huge advancement from alternative feeds that can become broken in the water, which leads to a lot of fine particles that are variable in size and nutrient leaching.

What are the ways to optimize feed ingredients and feed quantity (feed conversion rate) for an efficient fish farm?
Aquaculture has made significant improvements in nutritional understanding over the past 50-60 years, and we are moving even closer to ‘precision nutrition’, refining and polishing what we already know and making necessary adjustments and modifications. The real shift in feed optimisation – ingredients and quantity to effect farm performance – in the coming years is expected through digitisation. Cargill Aqua Nutrition will bring to market tools and capabilities that support farmers to track in near-real-time, fish performance to meet pre-determined goals and KPIs. These tools will support farmers to maximise productivity through the pillars of nutrition, sustainability and fish health, to protect fish welfare, to care for the environment and to deliver exceptional financial results.

What does fish welfare mean? Can fish welfare be achieved by feeding?
Fish welfare is at the core of fish nutrition. Our capabilities, products and services are developed and delivered with fish welfare in mind.

Sometimes environmental factors outside of the farmer’s control can impact fish welfare, such as temperature, salinity, algal blooms, disease can all have significant impacts on fish welfare. While farmers do everything within their power to ensure welfare is paramount importance, without sufficient and proper nutrition, the welfare of animals will inevitably be impacted, which is why feed composition and feeding practices are critical to fish welfare.

How possible is it to reduce the environmental footprint of farm fisheries while feeding fish in a way that maintains health and welfare?
Through our signature SeaFurther™ Sustainability program, Cargill is working with customers to help reduce carbon emissions in salmon farming by at least 30% by 2030. This can be achieved by creating tailored approaches that fit the need for each company, considering a comprehensive carbon footprint inventory and identifying ways to make reduction, such as improving feed conversion rates, reducing diesel emissions or identifying and developing lower footprint raw materials for feed.

Cargill Aqua Nutrition can also support the farmer by providing solutions to improve fish health and welfare, to boost the immune system, reduce mortality, and ensure fish remain satiated when compromised. Fewer losses (mortality and/or wasted feed) during these times, have a direct impact on the environmental footprint despite the intent being a direct impact on fish health and welfare: more fish are produced to harvest using the same resources, reducing the footprint per tonne of fish produced.

Cargill is working on solutions that do not require a reactive approach to fish health and welfare and that can have a positive effect on the environmental footprint. In 2019, we launched Essential Nitrogen; a dietary concept aimed at reducing the amount of total nitrogen in the feed yet the ability for fish to convert as efficiently to maintain similar growth and FCR results as standard feed. This feed concept not only allows farmers to ‘do more with less’, but also ensure there are less nitrogen emissions into the environment, reducing the impact on the local environment through nitrogen fuelled eutrophication driven by the nitrogen not absorbed from the feed into the fish. Essential Nitrogen is a precursor to new concepts and dietary designs that will revolutionise further the nutrition, sustainability and fish health space. Prior to this, the strongest tool for the farmer to manage nitrogen losses was through feed management to minimise uneaten feed and biomass capping. With better nitrogen management through nutrition and feed management, we expect farmers to be able to work more easily within their legislative limits.

Which feed ingredients/additives both support nutrition and protect the environment?
Cargill commits to buying certified fishmeal and oil, and we are engaged in many fishery improvement programs (FIPs) to develop more sustainable management and fishing practices. We are also collaborating with WWF and Finance Earth to establish a global fishery improvement fund, which can help to provide budgets for new FIPs helping to improve fishery management and practices more broadly. Over the last 20 years, we have gradually reduced our use of marine ingredients for the average global salmon feed composition by nearly 80%.

In addition, we are constantly looking for new and innovative ingredients that can be used in fish and shrimp feeds. We have recently introduced a range of novel ingredients, such as insect protein, algae, and single-cell proteins. These ingredients provide a sustainable alternative to traditional protein sources, reducing the reliance on marine ingredients.

Insect protein is an exciting development in sustainable fish feed production and has become an alternative to other sources of protein at all levels, including nutrition, production, and sustainability. Insects are rich in protein and can be produced using a fraction of the land, water, and resources required for traditional livestock production. In collaboration with Innovafeed we are finding new ways to reuse by-products and develop fish nutrition that promotes and enhances the health of farmed fish. Leveraging Innovafeed’s high-quality insect meal in aquafeed saves up to 16,000 tons of CO₂ for every 10,000 tons of insect protein.

We have also begun to include algal oil into all Norwegian fish feed, further helping to reduce fish farmers’ dependence on fish oil in aquaculture production. Among the range of alternative ingredients for aquaculture, algae oil is one of the few that can replace fishmeal and oil without sacrificing omega-3 levels – a critical component of seafood’s health messaging to consumers, as well as essential for the health of the fish themselves.

We are in programs devoted to responsible sourcing of soy and engage in several aquaculture best practice standards – such as Global GAP, BAP (Best Aquaculture Practice) and ASC (Aquaculture Stewardship Council) – to ensure we protect the environment whilst we continue to deliver sound nutrition to the fish.

What feeding solutions does Cargill support the aquaculture industry with? What are Cargill’s differences and promises in this area?
Cargill Aqua Nutrition offers a plethora of feeding solutions depending on species, geography, lifecycle stage and customer and consumer requirements. We focus our capabilities on Nutrition, Sustainability and Fish Health to deliver a holistic approach to welfare through feed and feeding solutions. With the increased focus on digitization, we will refine our portfolio to offer precision nutrition that more accurately meets the need of the animal being cultured whilst understanding and predicting the environment, working practices and market so that we can improve productivity whilst protecting the environment.

We will continue to work on sourcing new raw materials that reduce the reliance on marine proteins and oils and build more programs to increase the sustainability of those marine ingredients that we continue to purchase, we will leverage our signature sustainability program – SeaFurther™ – to support customers in reducing the carbon footprint, and we will create products and services that support fish health and welfare whilst ensuring all nutritional needs are met regardless of environment, lifecycle stage, geography and/or production goals.

Can you talk a little bit about the latest trends in the global fish feed market? What are the prominent topics in fish nutrition today?
‘New Farming approaches’ is a hot topic within the industry today, and Cargill Aqua Nutrition have built capabilities, products and services to serve market. Feeds that retain nutrients better in waterborne feeding systems, and feeds that have better pellet integrity in RAS, are examples, and we haves of the feed solutions we have created for this emerging market.

Moreover, when we move beyond feed, we partner with technology companies to create feed delivery systems or monitoring/measuring capabilities – such as acoustic feeders in shrimp – that help farmers improve productivity and maintain welfare.

What potential does aquaculture have in feeding the world’s growing population? In order to draw attention to the potential in this field, can you share your predictions with us about the future?
The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has stated that to feed a growing human population to 2050, the production of seafood must be increased. However, globally wild stocks are mainly maximally or over-fished already. Aquaculture is well positioned to fill the gap, but the growth in aquaculture must be developed sustainably according to the FAO, so as not to further deplete global resources in food supply chains. Good ocean stewardship will be required to meet this requirement and Cargill is able to support.

Aquaculture farmers around the world need to respond to the higher demand of seafood without compromising on nutritional values and sustainability of their fish feed. Cargill’s sustainable aquaculture program, SeaFurther™, aims to help them. As Cargill is part of an integrated global food system across multiple food value chains, it has a unique perspective on how to build solutions that last, balancing multiple and varied interests while also protecting the environment on land and in the ocean.

One way Cargill is leveraging its unique position across the supply chain to achieve carbon reduction is through regenerative agriculture. Aquaculture’s carbon footprint mainly stems from the mix of raw materials in the feed. Regenerative agriculture aims to restore the soil’s health and resilience, using techniques like low- or no-tilling, planting cover crops to prevent runoff and oxidation, crop diversity, and pollinator strips. As a result, the soil becomes a carbon sink instead of a source of emissions, reducing the carbon footprint of crops grown in it. In 2022, we teamed up with eight U.K. farms to pilot the same climate-friendly regenerative agriculture practices to achieve a 1,000-tonne carbon reduction. Our goal next year is to sign up more farmers and avoid over 10,000 tonnes of emissions.

About Gareth Butterfield
Gareth Butterfield joined Cargill in 2017 and boasts a long history in the aquaculture industry, feed manufacture and fish production. Butterfield holds a PhD in Aquaculture Genetics and Disease from the Institute of Aquaculture, University of Stirling and is currently based in British Columbia, Canada.