Fish feed constitutes around 50 percent of the costs in Norwegian aquaculture, and feed of a high quality is necessary on account of the fish and financial considerations.
The feed ensures the necessary supply of energy and nutrients to secure the fish's growth, health and welfare. Further, the feed is important for the product's quality and food safety, and the feed resources that are utilised are decisive for the sustainability of the entire production.
The development in the industry is constantly providing us new challenges with respect to nutrition, feed and feeding. We still have insufficient knowledge about how rapid growth influences the farmed fish's requirement for specific nutrients. Variations in price and access to raw materials results in the need to know which raw materials and amounts thereof can be used for different fish species and at the same time secure growth, feed utilisation, health and the quality of the fish we consume.
Several types of raw materials
Salmon feed was previously based on fishmeal and fish oil. However, these are limited resources, which mean other feedstuffs must be phased in as production increases.
The focus on sustainability and resource utilisation is increasing also within aquaculture, and we are working continually to find good alternative feedstuffs. Increasingly more vegetable feedstuffs are used and waste such as trimmings from the fish processing industry has become an important resource.
In comparison with other meat production, aquaculture is already an effective way of utilising resources. If we only consumed plant substances, all nutrition would of course have gone directly to food consumed by human beings. But in modern salmon farming, we yield 30 percent of the feed resources in the form of salmon fillet, which is twice as much as in production of, for example, pork.
Nofima has a goal of developing feed based on an optimal utilisation of existing and alternative feed raw materials.