Ingredients for Success: Advancing Sustainable Aquaculture through fish feed

Corinne

Welcome to the Salty Talks Podcast, a podcast all about sustainable aquaculture in Maine. I'm Corinne Newfie, the communication specialist with the Aquaculture Research Institute, and today I have Tim Harder here with me over Zoom to give an overview of fish feed. So I'm going to turn it over to him to tell us more about himself.

Tim

have a warehouse that's about: 1520

Corinne

So is the Kelp farm how you got interested in Aquaculture in the first place?

Tim

I think it all kind of happened together. 1s My degree was in, like I said, marine science actually studied sediment movement in the Sacco River, which has nothing to really do with it. And towards the end of my graduate program, I attended a lecture by Dr. Charles Yarrish, who's down in Connecticut, and he has done a ton of work with Kelp Aquaculture. And I just thought it was so cool. And we're right here by the ocean, so I decided to give it a shot. And what it sort of exposed me to is the way that we look at our food here in America I think is really kind of interesting. Where it comes from, what it's doing for us, what impact it has on the environment. These are all things that Aquaculture touches on. And even two, the fact that we import so much of our seafood, it's a really healthy, sustainable protein and we're importing it from other countries and making it very difficult to do it here in our own country. I think there's some real opportunities and some of it is even like a homeland security concern. There's work being done in North Carolina that's done with a grant from DHS, right? Like, it's a sense of national security to be able to produce your own food. And this is something that a lot of countries are sort of moving to. So when you start talking about food, specifically seafood, I think you start touching on a lot of social and environmental factors that I just think are really cool. And some of that just it all kind of developed together, right? Being out there on a boat and being able to farm your own food and understanding what you're contributing in terms of the nutrient cycle and bringing something local to people, all those concepts just kind of were reinforced as you're out there.

Corinne

ional company. They have over: 1500

Corinne

Have you ever been to the research facility in Norway?

Tim

I have not. I am scheduled to go this September. Yeah, it'll be my first time traveling there. So we're going to meet some of the team and hopefully learn a bunch more about what it is they do over there. But no, it'll be my first time traveling out of the country for spreading. So I'm pretty excited about it. That's awesome.

Corinne

And Norway is such a great location. Scandinavia is a great location.

Tim

Yeah, it's definitely not any place I was preparing to go, but here we are. So this is exciting.

Corinne

And what exactly is your role at Scretting?

Tim

So my role officially is key account manager for Enhancement Hatcheries in the east. For spreading east. I try to help our customers make correct decisions in what types of feed they're getting. Sometimes they have different program goals or price constraints or things like that. We also distribute a number of what we call our Life Start Diets. These are specialized diets for juvenile fish that covers both cold water and warm water species. So we generally help people make sure they're making the correct diet decisions. And then logistics is a big part of it, too. Making sure that they can get the feed on time and forecasting correct and all of those type of things.

Corinne

So today I want to talk about why the work going into fish feeds is important as we aim to make things more sustainable by experimenting with different ingredients and stepping away from fish and fish oil.

Tim

ike, they can have upwards of: 2025

Corinne

like amino acids and. 1s Proteins and whatnot.

Tim

Right? Exactly. There are a number of different things that an ingredient can do. Some of them can even be structural. Right. Can help hold the pellet together. Some of them can even have, like, a probiotic effect in the gut of the animal. Some of them can help the animal deal with cold temperatures and help them deal with really high temperatures. Right. There's always the nutritional digestible portion of the pellet, but there's also some other things that raw materials can do that really make a feed pellet much more than just a little brown pellet of food. Right. There's a lot of research and technology that goes into those things.

Corinne

You mentioned sustainability a few times, and I think it's important to note this in the case of wildfish, because nowadays a lot more people are starting to really pay attention to the environmental impact of their food. And this can help us reduce the need to rely on wild fish stocks for feed formulation.

Tim

Yeah, a lot of those fisheries that we utilize are what they call reduction fisheries. So they actually reduce. Um, the the amount of their fishery that goes to human consumption so that can be processed into fish meal for for other uses. They call those reduction fisheries. There's also fish meal that's produced from trimmings. Right. So there's some fish that get processed and there's significant amounts of material that's left over that can be utilized. Right. And that can get converted into fish meal too, which that supports a circ economy. That's obviously a desirable product as well, because you're reducing waste overall. When it comes to reduction fisheries. Spreading is very aware of where we source our material from. Our St. Andrews facility uses only MSC marine Stewardship Council certified fisheries to get their fish meal from. And so there's a real awareness of, you know, things like illegal and underreported fishering. Like, you know, we stay away from fisheries that are not certified and that don't do things sort of the right way. Right. So we want to make sure that we're not contributing or we're not a customer to somebody who's. Fishing in an irresponsible way or an unsustainable way, or using poor labor practices. So all those things kind of go into it when you're talking about marine raw ingredients.

Corinne

So if the feeds have more ingredients, are they more expensive to manufacture?

Tim

In a lot of cases, it makes feed less expensive, and in a lot of ways it gives us flexibility, right? So as you're knowledge base expands into the role or how different morale materials can be used for a feed, you have flexibility to react to the market, right? So if some raw ingredient that you're using becomes really scarce, or for instance, another country invades another country, and raw materials all of a sudden become very expensive, you have the ability to react and substitute accordingly. We use a concept called best cost formulation. Right? So our formulation can be modified to market conditions without sacrificing the nutritional content of the pellet, right? So it gives us a lot of flexibility in our supply chain, which in some cases makes the feed actually less expensive, but overall, makes the feed price very consistent year over year if you're using a pellet. And again, just to stick with our example, that's 80% fish meal and fish oil. And the price of fish oil doubles like it has in the last 18 months or two years. Now all of a sudden, your pellet price just went through the roof and there's really not much that you can do about it. But if you know that you can substitute other things in there, then you can keep that price a bit more stable for your customers, which is obviously a huge benefit.

Corinne

So what are some examples of alternatives that are going into these feeds? Like, is it algae, soy, yeast, insects?

Tim

Yeah, there's quite a bit of I don't know if I could list all of them, but soy is definitely something that's used poultry byproduct is a really good raw material. That's used poultry meal, which again contributes to that circular economy from the poultry industry, which, as you can imagine, is quite large. It's a great raw material for us to use. Algae oil is something that's definitely out there. People are starting to talk quite a bit about insect meal. Insect meal is something that it's a good raw material that we're starting to work with. People are starting to ask questions about things like that. Then there's a number of vegetable based products that used appropriately, can really help lead to a high quality pellet as well.

Corinne

So the fish need to be attuned to the food. We want them to eat it, obviously. Do you notice any change with the fish as to how they react with substituted ingredients versus what they'd be eating in the wild?

Tim

Yeah. So one thing that we have to consider when we're looking at a new raw material is nutrient digestibility. Right. So if you can have a raw material that, on paper has huge amounts of proteins and all of these wonderful things about it, but if it's not digestible in the gut of the species that you're trying to feed, then it doesn't really work. Right. And so that's part of the research that goes into a new raw material, and it does need to be palatable. Right. Like you said, the fish need to want to eat it. And so through a lot of testing, there are parts of the pallet that are when we add a raw material to a pellet, palatability of the animal is definitely taken in consideration. Right. So the best raw material in the world. Is not really very good or of much use to us if the fish will reject it, right. So that's part of our research when we look at new raw materials and also whether or not it's digestible within the gut of the animal. So once the animal accepts it, it's got to be able to digest it and do so in an efficient and healthy way. So there are some raw materials that you can include in a diet. They do have a benefit for the animal, but if you include them at too high a rate, there can then be a negative effect. Right. So sometimes we have to put limits on how much of a certain raw material you can put in there. Right. I think this concept is really relatable to people who, when you look at your own diet right, there are some things that it's nice to include. But if you just only ate pick your example, right? Like, if you only ate soy every day of the week, right, your body would not really be happy. But a little bit of soy adds some things to your diet that are good and healthy and can be part of a great diet. But too much of any one thing is probably not a good thing either, right?

Corinne

So is this what some of the research projects going on in Norway are looking at like fish behavior and how well they fare with different ingredients in their feed?

Tim

Yeah. So they are looking at the profile of raw materials and trying to see what it adds to the nutrition of the animal. They're looking at palatability. I think I mentioned this before, but there's also what we would call value added functions, right. Of some raw materials, some can provide value beyond just nutrition. So there are physical effects. Right. Some raw materials can help pellet stability. They can help fecal stability and effluent control. So obviously, after the animal eats it, there are raw materials that can be added so that the waste of the animal is more stable and doesn't affect your overall water quality. Right. And that's obviously a huge implication when you start thinking about like recirculating aquaculture systems, labrasse facilities, having a more stable fecal pellet and less nutrient leaching, having something that's easier to remove. These are huge considerations and something that really sets spreading apart in that particular segment of the industry. Also, there are probiotic effects. Some can actually stimulate an immune response in the animal, which is great, helps some animals become more robust in times of higher temperature and lower temperature. You can actually decrease mortality in some of these instances. You can make them more robust to potential disease states. Right. When the animal is challenged with pathogen on the farm, an animal with a more robust gut biome can actually be a little bit more better able to handle those situations and just sort of understanding what stress and changes in the environment the fisher are under allows us to add different vitamins and minerals. So that one really good example is that there are some diets that have increased level of zinc and some other minerals that really give them good skin health. Right. And so at times when the fish is being handled quite a bit, you think about times, like during vaccination or times when people are going to be working with the fish and they're going to be moved around in stress. A little bit of added protection for the skin can help reduce things like lesions and sores and make the animals better able to get through those sort of challenging periods.

Corinne

I like that you previously put this into a human perspective. It's easy to relate to. Like if we all have an enriched, well rounded diet with different foods and we take our probiotics and our vitamins, then we're also likely to not get sick with a virus or something like that. 1s So do Aquaculturists welcome these new feeds? Or is it sometimes met with hesitation?

Tim

That's where the rubber meets the road, as it were. And this is a huge part of what I do every day. So there are some Aquaculturists who they like anything else, they kind of do their own research. And sometimes that's good, and sometimes that's not good. They hear things like, well, if you add, if you add this ingredient, I heard that fish will do this. And if you add this, there's some folks who are definitely what I would consider traditionalists. They think that fish should be eating fish. And anything else you're putting in there is a filler and it's this and it's that. So I've heard some things like, that a bit of a more old school approach that little less open to change. And then there's other people who want to kind of try everything, right? And I think what's important for a grower, they really need to understand how it is that they're going to market their product. Like, what is it that they want to talk about with their product. There are Aquaculturists that talk about their fish being fed organic feed. That's important to them. That's part of their messaging. There's people who want to advertise that they have a sustainable feed, right? There's people who want to advertise that we're using. One of our customers overseas actually designed a marketing campaign around the inclusion of insect meal with their fish, right? They actually was on the logo, had a, you know, a fish had this cool sort of artistic impression of a fish and an insect together, right? Like and so they were talking about the diet in in what you might consider an all natural sense, right? This is, you know, fish eat insects, right? And that's what our diet is mimicking. So a big part of it is understanding what message you're trying to get to your consumer. If you want to reduce your impact on the marine environment, there's actually diets that can be made that have no marine ingredients at all. But the question then remains, how do you market that to the average consumer? How does the consumer value that, and what is it that they need to see in terms of packaging or terminology or whatever it may be in order to give you the value for doing that? Additional work, right? Because it is additional work to try out new diets and to trial them and to understand how it's affecting your fish growth and then to understand what the impact on your fillet quality is and flavor and all of those different types of considerations. So sort of blazing those new trails with consumers or I should say with growers, often leads back to what is it they're trying to communicate to the consumer. And so there is a bit of extra work in there. We stand by our research group, so we're usually fairly confident if we're offering you a new raw material. It's been well vetted already, but again, it becomes a decision for the grower to understand exactly what it is the goal of their company is.

Corinne

So do you know how consumers reacted to this packaging you were talking about with the fly and the fish on it?

Tim

n't know. I believe it was in: 2019

Corinne

You just summed up a lot of my grad school experience. When you walk into a store and something says organic or cage free, something like that, people tend to gravitate towards it. Or like on a tuna can when it says dolphinsafe, that's the one that people want. But talking about feed, it's hard to not be really wordy when you show what a fish was fed. People just want to go into the grocery store, get their food and leave. They don't want to have to sit there and mull over all of this information. 1s It's interesting to think about how this can be succinctly summed up on some sort of label. Or would it be a deterrent for people to read that their food wasn't fed marine ingredients? Now this is just like a wandering tangent,right?

Tim

Yeah. 1s The labels that are out there, the third parties that are out there, the Aquaculture Stewardship Council and the Global Aquaculture Alliance with their best Aquaculture program, the BAP certification, there's a tremendous amount of work that goes into those. But again, the consumer is still skeptical, right? There's something about seafood that makes us all very skeptical about what it is that we're buying. And so I don't think folks have really figured that out in terms of what works best when they say things like all natural and sustainable. Those terms are still a bit amorphous, I think, in the marketplace. And so, again, it does drive feed decisions that are really impactful. Right. If changing out a raw material or adding in this or adding in that can change the price point of your feed dramatically. We have many conversations with growers who say things like, well, we want to sell to Whole Foods, for instance. And Whole Foods does quite a bit of work around how they market their seafood and how they message really, all of their proteins. But in order to comply with the standards that Whole Foods has a huge impact on the price point of your feed. And so, again, the grower then has to decide is the increase in price for the feed that I'm going to pay going to be worth what it is Whole Foods is getting me? Is that what's important to us, to our company? So sometimes those things come down to dollars and cents. Sometimes they come down to a social responsibility thing like what is the company? What's most important to them in the marketplace? But I always kind of think that for seafood, the demand really is so great. We're not really even close domestically to supplying the demand for the United States of America. Sometimes I feel like our customers try to differentiate themselves maybe too much, right? Like being local, being a domestic supplier is preferable sometimes. And I think that sometimes we put a bit too finer point on that messaging. But, you know, again, that's like sort of a personal decision for each company that we work with.

Corinne

So clearly the technology is there to develop these feeds. But what is the scalability here of alternative ingredients in fish feeds? Because it kind of seems to me like this I don't know, like chicken egg type situation.

Tim

Yeah, no, that's a great point. And something that comes up quite a bit with raw materials is that people hear about a raw material and they think it's great, and sometimes it is great. Right. But the thing that you have to remember is that that raw material, if we're going to use it, needs to be available all year long. Right. So your seasonal crops, that becomes a huge challenge. One that I've heard a number of times. People say, well, seaweed is fantastic, and we're able to harvest seaweed. Let's use seaweed. And so just as an exercise, you say, okay, well, how much seaweed can you produce? Can you produce it all year long? And this becomes really important, too. Is the nutrient composition of your seaweed going to be the same? So, in other words, if you have a seasonal crop or a seasonal product, where and when it's grown is going to greatly impact the nutrient composition. Right. One really cool example I heard this is from my previous supply chain days, budweiser brews beer, right? And they use beechwood aging, and they use rice, and they use water, and they use hops. These are all seasonal ingredients that can vary from season to season and from place to place, depending on where you source them from. But Budweiser tastes the same. 1s Every time you drink it, or so I'm told. Right. So they do an unbelievable job of working with those seasonal ingredients. When it comes to actual nutrient composition within a feed, if your feed or if your raw material varies, that's very undesirable for us. We need to be able to count on when we're formulating the feed. We need to be able to count on your levels of protein, the levels of fat. We need a highly consistent product that is available all year long and available in quantities that we're going to use it. There are customers that order in the thousands of tons per year. Right. So if you're adding an ingredient and we're going to include it just for numbers sake, a 10% inclusion rate, you're in the hundreds of tons per year. And we need to be able to count on that. Right. Again, in using our example about insect meal, there are insect producers that we're beginning to work with, but they haven't really scaled just yet because they're trying to figure out what the market is and we're trying to figure out exactly what our demand is going to be. So as they scale up, obviously the other benefit to that is that they're going to get more efficient and the price point of their material is going to come down. So as you're producing things in really small batches, what you might consider like R and D batches, it's going to be really expensive on a cost per pound basis. Right. As they start scaling up and getting bigger and bigger, that cost comes down and now it becomes easier for us to use. But as you mentioned, it's sort of a chicken in the egg scenario. We can say, hey, we think insect meal is great. Let's scale up and buy all this high quantities of insect meal. And then we get to the market. We realize that maybe the customer rejects it, or maybe the customer doesn't understand it, or maybe our customers, the growers, are skeptical of it and don't want it in their feeds. Right. So those are all things that need to get figured out when you talk about a raw material. People are very sensitive to change in the industry. As you mentioned, they're growing fish and they've been using a certain feed for a long time, and they understand the results. They get those consistent results that they can plan on and forecast to, which are really important. And now you're going to institute a change. Right. It takes a customer that's willing to work with you a little bit on that and say, well, let's see what the effects are. Obviously, we're not going to give them a feed that's going to negatively affect their production. Right. But there's a certain level of trust there and they need to be able to move forward with us in a partnership. So all of those things come into effect when when you start using a new raw material, the price point to start off with is generally going to be high. And then as we work with it more and more and more, the price point is going to come down a little bit. And we're starting to see that with some of these new raw materials in the marketplace now.

Corinne

One more question about these hurdles. Are there regulatory hurdles like how the FDA certifies things or health standards that you might have to worry about for things to be marketable?

Tim

Yep. There is approval status that has to be, you know, any ingredient that we use to grow food for human consumption has to be approved for use by the country in which it's being used. And so, as Spreading is an international company, this can sometimes get really can get really tricky. Right. So we produce in Canada and we sell here in the US. And the rules are different for both places. The rules on how you label things are different. The rules on what you can put in feed in Canada are different than what they are here in the US. We also import feeds from our spreading facilities in France and Spain, and they have different rules and regulations. And so we just got our inspection, sort of our routine inspection on some of our feeds from the FDA we received in a shipment from France, and they went through and they're testing to make sure everything that's on that label is indeed what's in the feed. Right. So in addition to all of that R and D work that goes into a new raw material, you then have to do the work on the regular Tory side to make sure that folks who use this are going to then be able to sell their fish. Right. The approval status is sort of a layered thing. There are ingredients that you can use that aren't even allowed in certain countries and whatnot. So that can certainly add a layer of complexity when you're talking about expanding your raw material basket.

Corinne

That's another example of something that I think would be so great for consumers to know, that it's been through so many vetting processes.

Tim

And I think that there's a good level of responsibility, especially here in North America, including Canada as well. Things like animal welfare are taken into account. Some of these are part of third party certification. Even when you get down to I was reading an article the other day, they even get down to how the animal is slaughtered and they want that done. People want that done in a humane way. There's sort of old practices that are getting phased out. Then there's people who are saying, well, yes, but we have smaller producers and we think this is a more humane way to slaughter the animal. And people are actually working to make sure the smaller producers can still afford to be able to do that. Right. So the level of scrutiny with how your food is fed, treated and handled right up until the moment that it's slaughtered really is quite remarkable. Right. And to your point, I would say anything with a label on it, but again, anything that's produced locally here in North America, you can be reasonably assured that that animal is being treated in a humane way and there's not a negative impact or I should say there is a manageable impact on the environment. Right. Obviously you're going to have some effect. But people are looking at that. People are looking at that in a very serious way. And the regulatory bodies and agencies are keeping close watch. Right.

Corinne

Yeah. And I think that something important to know is that with any food production system there's going to be some sort of environmental impact. And understanding these impacts is definitely something to think about when considering what protein you're going to buy when you're shopping at the grocery store.

Tim

Yeah. And something Aquaculture routinely stands by is the fact that when you compare growing fish to any other type of protein production whether it be especially when you think about our terrestrial protein production in terms of carbon emission in terms of feed conversion rate all of those type of things aquaculture we sort of come out on top with those things. And that's a big part of why aquaculture is part of what we called the blue revolution. Right. Like producing our food more sustainably so that we have less of an impact on the environment. Right. So you can grow. Moe actually released something they were talking about. 1s Um, how much marine ingredients they use or how much fish they use to produce one kilo of salmon. Right. And it's actually less than one kilo of fish in gets you 1 fish out. I think the number that they that was reported is, like, zero point 65, which is amazing. Right. So you're using basically half a fish with some other ingredients to create one whole fish. Right. So you're producing protein in a very sustainable way as compared to our terrestrial forms of protein production, and you're doing so with less carbon impact. And again, you're doing so in an industry that is more closely monitored than probably any of the other ones.

Corinne

I think this is a good wrapping up point, just looking at the time. But I do want to ask if there's just any last minute things that you wanted to say.

Tim

I think that the longer I'm with Aquaculture, it sort of reinforces a lot of the reasons that I got into the industry in general. There's a lot of folks that I work with at Spreading, and even our I won't name them, right? But our competitors. There is a consciousness among feed suppliers and producers to be doing things I'll do air quotes right the right way, and to make sure that we're not just to put the big scary image up there, right. We're not just taking all the fish from the sea to grow salmon for folks. We're constantly looking for new solutions that are more environmentally friendly, more environmentally friendly, that reduce pressure on supply chains that are more locally produced, and allow us to create a product that's overall better for food consumption for human beings. Right. And I think that's the ultimate goal. And people are really passionate about that idea all through the Aquaculture community, but especially where I work, too, which is which is pretty great. All right, well, it's probably the most exciting topic that you'll cover, so that's really good.

Corinne

Thanks, Tim, for taking time to educate us about fish feed.