Sustainability in Aquafeeds: Beyond Ingredient Selection
Piece by Dr. Van To, Senior Research Scientist
Sustainability in aquafeed is a lot more than ingredient selection. Much of the focus has been on reducing marine ingredients (e.g., fishmeal and fish oil) by using alternatives (e.g., plant proteins, animal by-products, microbial ingredients, insect meals, and algae oils). This work has helped improve the sustainability of aquafeeds, but ingredients are only part of the story. We also need to take into account the practical production issues such as how feeds are manufactured, how they perform in different farming systems, and how they affect fish health.
A potential ingredient might perform very well in a feeding trial. It may be highly digestible, palatable, and support good growth of the fish, without affecting feed conversion ratio or production costs. But what about when you actually attempt to make the feed? Does the ingredient extrude nicely? Does it impact pellet durability or water stability? Does it increase the energy consumption in the manufacturing process or cause operational problems in the feed mill? These practical factors can have a real impact on sustainability, but are not always taken into consideration in nutrition studies. For one reason, many nutrition research programs do not have access to feed manufacturing equipment. At Onda, we don’t just replace ingredients; we include extrusion compatibility. Our in-house pilot-scale extrusion and vacuum-coating systems allow us to evaluate pellet quality, processing performance, and manufacturability alongside nutritional performance. This gives us a better idea of whether a nutritionally valuable ingredient can perform well under practical feed manufacturing conditions.
The production system is important too. A feed designed for a recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) may need different nutritional and physical characteristics than a feed used in a flow-through system. Feed utilization, waste production, water quality, and overall system performance can all affect the sustainability of a feed. Onda has both RAS and flow-through research capabilities. This allows us to test feeds under different production conditions and better understand how they perform in environments that are closer to commercial aquaculture.
Fish health is another important part of the equation. A well-formulated feed cannot deliver sustainable goals when performance is limited by disease, environmental stress, or poor survival. Therefore, functional feed ingredients or feed additives (probiotics, prebiotics, beta-glucans, phytogenic compounds, immune-supporting ingredients, and gut health products) are increasingly being used to support fish health, robustness, and resistance to disease. These tools can contribute meaningfully to sustainability goals by improving survival and overall production efficiency. Our capability to conduct functional feed evaluations, fish health research, disease challenge studies, environmental challenge trials, and vaccine testing at Onda allows us to look at feed sustainability from several different angles rather than relying on a single measure.
Sustainable aquafeed is not about finding one perfect ingredient or a single formulation target. It’s about knowing the inter-relationships of ingredients, feed manufacturing, production performance, and fish health. This broader approach and the flexibility to test and evaluate solutions across the full production cycle will be needed to move aquaculture toward greater sustainability.