Lowering the use of marine raw materials coming from wild catch has been a long-term objective for the feed industry and the offer of alternatives is expanding, Danish feed firm BioMar Group's Chile managing director, Eduardo Hagedorn, told Undercurrent News.

Lower availability of marine raw material and consumers preferences has pushed Biomar to look for resources that allow to reduce the pressure on the marine resources, Hagedorn said.

He added that development of raw materials is important for the sustainability of this industry in the future, so a "company like ours is constantly researching and innovating".

Hagedorn pointed out that Biomar has an exclusive agreement to distribute AlgaPrime DHA microalgae-based feed ingredient globally.

AlgaPrime DHA, developed by Bunge and TerraVia, is a sustainable source of omega-3s, which is responsible for the product's industry-low forage fish dependency ratio (FFDR) of 0.5 kilograms. FFDR is a metric used to evaluate how many kilograms of wild fish are needed to produce one kilo of farmed fish.

FFDR is a metric used to evaluate how many kilograms of wild fish are needed to produce one kilo of farmed fish. Average FFDR per salmon in Chile is 1.3:1.

Development in feed composition

There are important developments in this area, he also noted.

"Today there are diets that include alternative raw materials, such as algae oils, which allow to replace fish oil, without salmon losing its content of omega-3," Hagedorn told Undercurrent.

"The algae oil allows us to replace fishoil, also if not to 100% yet, while it is possible to produce diets with 0% of fishmeal. Ten years before this was not possible," Hagedorn said.

He pointed out that at present the firm was producing product lines of lower diets for salmon that have no fishmeal at all, which "give us great flexibility to always changing raw material market".

Talking about other alternative ingredients, he pointed to trimmings of different types and other raw materials in the pipeline as insect meal.

"Today the use of diets with higher energy levels that improve the productive cycle in the sea and the factor of converting feed into kilos of salmon meat is a challenge," he said, noting that innovation in the use of raw material has been expanded and would also drive innovation in the future.

He stressed that the FFDR per salmon in Chile had dropped in some cases below 1:1; for Silverside down to the level of 0.5;1. This shows that salmon has become a net producer of marine protein and not a net consumer of protein, Hegedorn said.

"This is the case of Silverside, a premium pacific salmon that will be available in the market during next season," he noted.

Chilean salmon farmer Ventisqueros is set to use a salmon feed developed by BioMar that includes the ingredient AlgaPrime DHA in its Silverside-brand premium Pacific coho salmon.

Silverside production will be available in the US as of Oct. 1, according to Ventisqueros. "We already have several confirmed customers and everything indicates that the product will be successful," Ventisqueros' commercial director, Guillermo Staudt, told Undercurrent.

Antibiotics

Consumption of antibiotics in 2016 decreased 31% year-on-year and it is expected to further decrease in 2017, Hagedorn observed.

The industry has taken a holistic approach to reduce the antibiotic utilization, according to Hagedorn. Disease detection and fast reaction have proven to be key factors to successful treatments while farming practices, genetics and strengthening fish health status through functional nutrition are helping the industry to decrease the use of antibiotics through prevention.

Different actors of the industry are investing a lot in research on this, so we expect to see further improvements in the near future, Hagedorn said.

In relation an ongoing investigation on the competitiveness of the Chilean feed industry, Hagedorn preferred not to report. He said that the investigation was still ongoing, adding that the feed industry in Chile is very competitive.