MC: I'm Mark Clements, Editor-in-Chief, Poultry, with Watt Global Media. Today we're going to talk about fish. More specifically, we're going to look at intensive African catfish production and why this might be of interest to the poultry industry.
Why would a poultry company be interested in producing fish? Well, there are some similarities between the two industries, particularly when it comes to feed, processing, biosecurity and intensive animal production. And the technology being developed for recirculating aquaculture systems could make fish production an interesting diversification opportunity for vertically integrated poultry companies.
To discuss this, I'm joined today by Dr. Danijel Gospić, veterinarian, fish farmer, and co-owner of aquaculture company G2O. Danijel, welcome to The Future of Poultry podcast.
DG: Hi Mark and thank you very much for the opportunity to be a guest in your podcast. I hope it will be interesting for our listeners.
MC: We're delighted to have you here Danijel. I'm sure it will be. Danijel perhaps we could start with the obvious question: Why should the poultry industry be interested in African catfish?
DG: Yes, this is very interesting question, and when you are familiar with the poultry industry and with the African catfish indoor farming, then you can see that there are a lot of similarities.
African catfish, in contrast to any other fish, can breathe air from the atmosphere So it's produced like terrestrial animal. You have to ventilate the space, but it's actually living in the water. So it's something between chicken and a fish. And also these fish tolerate extremely high densities. It's very robust. Biologically, it's ideal fish for industrial farming, and nobody is as close to industrial farming as a poultry industry.
Our last innovations in indoor African catfish farming lead us to the poultry industry because we think that poultry industry has the biggest potential to implement and scale up scale up African catfish as a new chicken between fishes, between fish.
So actually, the poultry industry, if you look industrial aquaculture or industrial animal protein farming, already has a lot of assets and a lot of capabilities needed for vertical integration. The thing is that aquaculture is not yet vertically integrated. In most cases, it's fragmented production with variety of technologies and species.
So to implement and scale up African catfish, I think the biggest chance and the easiest way and the most natural way has a poultry industry.
MC: What would you say are the main similarities between intensive poultry production and the system that you're using to produce catfish?
DG: In our system, which is indoor system, if you look the building, it looks the same as a poultry farming building.
And the thing is that we control indoor environment, so we are not dependent on a climate. We are not dependent on the water sources. We need very small amount of fresh water, so basically, you can put our farm anywhere on global level, and it can be positioned beside the poultry farms, which are already strategically positioned close to the logistic centers, et cetera.
Also the African catfish farming can be standardized, it can be optimized, it can be scaled up on a much similar way as a poultry is.
MC: One of the things that you're doing differently from conventional recirculating aquaculture is the way that you handle solids and nutrients. Could you explain how that works?
DG: Yes. We have a long experience with African farming African catfish farming in RAS because we build as a consultant a few recirculation systems. And we also operate our own system for the last three years. And during this operation, we make a very big progress, and this progress is done in a quite opposite way as the fundament of standard recirculation aquaculture system.
As a fundament of recirculation RAS systems it is food which, feed which must be highly digestible, with high ratio of the animal protein to achieve as low as possible FCR because the waste or excrements from the feeding must be, as soon as possible, disposed out from the RAS system, otherwise it will pollute the water.
Well, in our system we develop something that we call anaerobic biofloc, and it's internal recycling of nutrients. So the water is rich with the nutrients, and we transfer nutrients to the bacterial biomass, which is re-utilized by the fish. And on that way we reduce demand for high protein feed, or you call it expensive feed.
We improve the health of the fish because of probiotic effect. And also we have many other impacts like energy consumption. So we reduce dramatically our energy consumption below 0.5 kilowatt hours per kilo of produced fish And beside this beside these differences in general, our recirculation system is built quite different than conventional recirculation systems.
For instance, in the same building, we have a whole cycle from the broodstock hatchery nursery fingerlings to the table size fish, so it's not a separate room. We do it in the same room. On that way, we reduce capital investment and operational costs. Also, our building has very good footprint utilization in the terms of volume of the water per square meter of the building.
And also our strategy is the best equipment is no equipment. So we reduce number of equipment, complexity of devices that we have inside. So our system is extremely easy to operate - you don't need highly educated staff. System by itself is very cheap to maintain, very robust, and this makes a big differences between other recirculation systems which are on the market and our ones.
Because our philosophy is that we are basically a fish farmers and the same time developers of aquaculture solutions, so we are always looking from the practical point of view and efficiency. We don't look on a recirculation system as a chance to get benefit, financial benefit as much as possible during the construction. We are looking long-term efficiency and, which is reflected in the results which cannot be denied.
MC: You report very low energy consumption in your system. What are the main factors that allow you to achieve this? And how important is energy consumption to the economics of intensive fish production?
DG: Energy consumption is one of the major, major points or major differences that you can make is with the energy, which is very expensive. And our figure, which is below 0.5 kilowatt hours per kilo of fish, it's very promising and very low result compared to others. There are many steps which cumulatively gain to our low energy consumption, but the major thing is that we don't release sludge out from the system.
So our sludge stays in the system and is transferred to the bacterial biomass. This process produces the heat. So as African catfish is tropical fish, in our system, the cost of heating is almost zero, or it is zero when we have some minimum biomass of the fish in the system So the major difference is in in this sludge reutilization in the system.
But also whole building is made as a compact system with a very high footprint utilization. There are not much heat losses. And the feeding capacity that we gain, it's about three to four kilograms of feed per one kilo per one cubic meter of the water, which is extremely high for the RAS standards.
So you must know that higher biomass and higher feeding rate produce the feed heat. So heat as a major cost in other system is in our system practically excluded. We also have special regime of aeration of the water because we are keeping aerobic and anaerobic zones, and this regime is also quite unique in our system.
And at the end. in the same building, we have the whole cycle broodstock hatchery, nursery, fingerlings, table size fish, which use the same equipment, same blowers, same pumps. So actually, we have very few equipment parts which are very well attuned and optimized, and all this together gain low energy consumption.
MC: Another interesting figure you've put forward is the amount of fish that can be produced from a relatively small building footprint. What does that mean in practical terms?
DG: I think that in all animal farming or protein, animal protein production, it is one of the key factors how much of animals you can produce or farm per one square meter per year.
So in African catfish we can achieve about one ton of fish produced per one square meter of a building. This is important from two aspects, and first aspect is, of course, capital investment. We need much smaller building much smaller building to achieve this production of one ton per square meter, compared to competitors.
And also high density and good footprint utilizations means also lower energy consumption to maintain the, the parameters that we want indoor And I want also like to stress that African catfish is probably only animal, not only fish, but only animal which can be produced so intensely per in footprint parameters. These figures say that we need a very small area, so it's not land demanding and also it's not water demanding to produce this fish as much as you need in some local markets.
MC: Now, feed is obviously one of the biggest costs in any intensive animal production system, and you touched on this earlier, but how does your approach to nutrient recycling affect the type of feed that can be used and potentially its cost?
DG: High-quality feed is one of the prerequisites for any recirculation system. This was the paradigm before we managed to establish this anaerobic biofloc. In anaerobic biofloc, you need the ratio between carbon and nitrogen. So you need a ratio between nitrogen and the carbon to provide to bacteria to create a biofloc. So if you use a high protein feed, you will have a lot of nitrogen in the water, but you will not have enough carbon.
So, in our system, we can reduce the amount of the nitrogen in the food, and actually the proteins are the biggest cost in the cost feed. So we, when we reduce nitrogen and we increase carbon in the food, we compensate a part of the proteins with the bacterial biomass, and this is the big difference between conventional recirculation systems and our system.
This is particularly important if you build a recirculation system in the areas in the world which are not so developed and they don't have good access to the high-quality feed, because usually for aquaculture feed must be extruded, must be from the best ingredients to achieve results.
So in our case our system is much more flexible in the terms of the quality of the feed, and I think that with the trials and with the experiments and progress we can go very down with the protein ratio in the feed. And we can maybe come even to the poultry quality of the poultry feed which is used. And this is, unimaginable for a recirculation world, what is happening.
MC: Now, the African catfish has some fairly unusual biological characteristics, you mentioned earlier it has the ability to breathe atmospheric air and tolerate high stocking densities. How important are those characteristics when it comes to running a commercial operation?
DG: I think that the key for success is biology of the African catfish, because this fish is adapted to survive drought dry seasons in Africa and drought in a hot areas of the world. So where is no water, they can basically survive in any moisture environment. It's a swamp in the mud.
The biological capabilities to adapt to the harsh environment is the key parameter which is so important for aquaculture. They tolerate densities about 10 times higher compared to other species which are usual in aquaculture. It means that also the capital investment is 10 times lower than with other fishes because you can produce 10 time more per same volume of the water of African catfish compared, for instance, with tilapia.
Furthermore, beside this robustness of African catfish, disease resistance, et cetera, they have a extremely high quality of meat, and this meat is suitable for mass consumption because it doesn't have some specific taste of fish. So when you eat it, when you taste it, you have feeling that you are eating turkey or a chicken, so many peoples don't even recognize the fish taste.
It has a boneless filet, which is also very big factor in today's consumer habits. So it can be applied from the highest culinaric to the public institutions, for instance, for hospitals. So potential of this fish from biological point of view is incredible.
We have about 80 references in the recirculation systems. Our company, which design recirculation systems, and we work with a variety of species. We also produce beside African catfish, trout, and carp, and we have experience with many species, but it's nothing similar to African catfish. When we speak about mass production, industrial scale I don't know any other species which is even close to the African catfish.
MC: So let's say a poultry integrator is considering fish production. What existing infrastructure and expertise could it use, and where might it need to develop new expertise?
DG: I think that true development of aquaculture, specifically with African catfish, will continue as integration of aquaculture in the existing poultry business.
We think that poultry companies can continue work that they do, and African catfish could be just another product in their portfolio. So I think they have most of the expertise needed to implement very fast African catfish farming, and actually the biggest thing that they need is a fish farm, but only they already have feed mills, they have experience with diets, with the preparing pelleted feed. They have knowledge about biosecurity, about animal farming, about diseases, about standardized procedures, about marketing, processing, everything. So for them it's very easy to implement African catfish, and this part where you need the farming, they will adapt very fast because they already have experience, and there are many similarities between poultry farming and African catfish farming.
So I think that they don't need big efforts to implement, and they have beside the technical capabilities, they have also financial capabilities because they are much bigger companies compared to aquaculture companies. So they have all capacities to implement, and, furthermore, I don't think that there is just another product or another type of production integrated in existing farming.
I see a lot of synergies. For instance, from the rendering, from the poultry waste, they produce a poultry meal which can be incorporated in food for African catfish, and also vice versa. They can use African catfish waste from processing as a fish meal for the chicken feed.
I think that with African catfish they can actually improve the profitability of existing assets without of a big changes in organization or in work in a company. It's not so bad to stress also that the poultry industry is optimized and standardized to the very high level. So if you want to improve something in the poultry industry, it's improving all the time, but there are small differences, small changes with the effort because it's already on the level of the top optimization.
On the other hand, fish farming still operates with the higher margins. The products are usually more expensive, the margins are bigger, and it's very big space for improvement on the genetic. for instance, nutrition, and we can see also on the technology. So I think it's for the next few decades aquaculture can be improved very much with the models that are already used in the poultry.
MC: You're proposing a vertically integrated operation combining fish production with feed and processing and... what would be the biggest challenges for scaling something like this up?
DG: So I think when big poultry vertical integrator should start with the African catfish, I don't see that there are many challenges that they should cope. At least I think it will be much easier way compared to some fish farming, company which would like to scale up African catfish. Because I think that big potential of African catfish is in scaling and to to make a mass production, not make exclusive or small production for a local market.
So whatever a chicken presents on global level, I think that African catfish has a potential to become the same level as a chicken in the eyes of the customers So I think with all the capabilities which already exist in the poultry business that implementation and integration of specifically African catfish indoor farming would be a easy way.
Sure, and the biggest the biggest challenge is always the market. But I think that market already exists in the level of a cheap fish fillets. For instance, the USA imports about in value of about 10 billion US dollars every year of cheap frozen fillets of some kind of fish, mostly from the Asia.
And if you look poultry farming, whenever it exists, it's not big threat for a country regardless the standard of the country or otherwise production cost. It not big threat import of chicken from other parts of the world because chicken farming is already optimized and standardized and industrialized to this level that there is no big threat for competition.
And I think the same level can be achieved with the African catfish, and I think that poultry integrators can do it very efficiently and get experience in a very short period.
MC: Finally, before we finish, tell us if you would, if a poultry company's considering diversification into aquaculture, what would be the key questions that management should be asking itself before making that investment?
DG: I think that management should first of all check the market potential for cheap fish fillets. After that, I think they should visit our farm and check all the parameters, or technical parameters and capabilities of our farm, and then they should sign a contract with us. So I think that's the only three steps they need.
Because with the capacities they have, all kind of capacities, I think for them would be very easy to understand how to integrate fish farming in existing business.
MC: Okay. Danijel, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast.
DG: Mark, thank you for opportunity. I hope it was interesting, and I wish you all the best in your work.
MC: It's been a pleasure to talk to you, Danijel. Thank you. Listeners, thank you for joining us today, and don't forget to look out for future editions of The Future of Poultry podcast. Goodbye.
