Draft Article South Dakota Soybean Leader
5/17/13
From Field to Fish
As demand for fish and seafood increases throughout the world, so do the opportunities to develop U.S. aquaculture. A key to that growth could be the development of more economical fish diets made from soybeans grown in your fields.
Aquaculture is a fledgling industry in the United States but opportunities for growth are real. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, by 2030, an additional 41 million tons of fish per year will be needed to maintain current levels of fish consumption for an expanded world population. But, our oceans are gravely endangered with 80 percent of global fish stocks fully exploited or over exploited. This creates huge opportunities for farm-raised fish and seafood. The United States imports over 80 percent of the seafood we consume, over half of which is produced through aquaculture.
South Dakota Soy Casts for Lunker Market
Hoping to reel in a new market for the state’s soybean farmers, the South Dakota Soybean Research and Promotion Council (SDSRPC) has invested $1.7 million in a three-year research project at South Dakota State University (SDSU) that seeks to include soybean meal and other soy-based ingredients in the diets of fish that can be produced locally.
“For most agricultural food products the United States is a net exporter, but we import most of our seafood and fish. That’s something we’d like to change,” says Doug Hanson, a director on the Council who farms near Elk Point, SD. “We are investing checkoff dollars in research to develop the domestic aquaculture industry and create a new value-added market for soybeans. That will be a good thing for our farmers and our state.” Hanson also serves on the national board of the Soy Aquaculture Alliance.
SDSU has an aquaculture facility equipped with 176 tanks operating on six recirculating aquaculture systems, funded in part by SDSRPC. Michael Brown, fisheries scientist at SDSU, is leading the soy feed research project, which is in its second year. He and his team are evaluating different processing methods to improve the quality of soy protein for fish diets, formulating diets for various species, conducting fish feeding trials and evaluating responses of the fish to the diets.
Many commercially produced fish require a high protein diet and marine fishmeal has been the protein of choice. However, high demand is depleting fishmeal resources at an unsustainable pace causing prices to escalate from $1,400 per ton up to $2,200 per metric ton last year. In contrast, soybeans are sustainable, readily available, economical, and they provide a reasonable match to the amino acid profile of fishmeal.
“Defatted soybean meal is about 48 percent protein, but through processing we can boost that to 65-70 percent so it is very similar to fishmeal,” says Brown “I believe we can come up with a sustainable soy protein ingredient to replace fishmeal at about half the cost. That adds value for the soybean producer and creates opportunities for the development of another industry in the upper Midwest.”
Making a Better Fish Feed
Brown and his colleagues are manipulating soybean meal to make the protein more digestible, improve the amino acid profile and reduce anti-nutritional factors such as trypsin inhibitors. They have achieved highly desirable results using a microbial conversion process on toasted soybean meal. The microbes are successfully converting carbohydrates into more protein. For now, Brown is calling the finished product, microbially converted soybean meal (MCSBM). He says MCSBM will cost about 25 percent less to produce than the soy protein concentrates currently being used in fish diets.
Bench scale to pre-pilot scale research is being conducted to optimize the processes. The research will move to pilot scale production sometime in 2014. Once commercialized, Brown envisions the microbial processing facility being located next to a soybean crushing plant.
Brown is testing his soy-based feed on high value fish that are best adapted to the Upper Midwest. “We are seeing good performance from the diets we’ve created for yellow perch and rainbow trout,” he says. “These species are carnivorous so they require greater amounts of high quality protein than other fish so they are a good test of our feed.”
New Business Opportunities
At present, there isn’t much food fish aquaculture production in South Dakota. “We have a few facilities producing rainbow trout outdoors in the Black Hills and four Hutterite colonies that produce tilapia in indoor recirculating aquaculture systems,” says Brown.
There are facilities across the border. MinAqua Fisheries in Renville, Minn. is a large tilapia producer. This spring, Cardinal Farms Aquaculture broke ground for a $1 million fish production facility in South Sioux City, Neb. that will produce 170,000 pounds of hybrid striped bass annually. It will be co-located with Cardinal Farms’ greenhouses.
“Aquaculture has been moving toward temperature-controlled, intensive indoor tank production with recirculating systems that use filters to maintain high water quality. There also is growing interest in aquaponic systems where you co-culture fish and plant material. Waste in the water is converted by beneficial bacteria into nutrient-rich water to grow vegetables or herbs,” Brown says.
He and the soybean growers anticipate these developments along with an economical, high quality soy-based fish feed will encourage more aquaculture production in South Dakota.
Pull Quote:
“Fishmeal has gotten very expensive. If we could produce a lower cost feed with comparable performance to fishmeal then I believe we could grow our domestic aquaculture industry in South Dakota and elsewhere.” — Mike Brown, SDSU
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Sidebar 1:
Aquaculture Major Part of New Agriculture Technology Center in Brookings
The $2 million Agriculture Technology Center for Rural Enterprise being built by the Brookings Economic Development Corporation will have a major aquaculture focus, according to Michael Brown, SDSU fisheries scientist. “There will be 256 tanks and 8 recirculating aquaculture systems, pilot-scale feed production facilities and analytical labs for testing feed as well as fish tissues,” he says.
The 30,000-square-foot facility will enable the integration of individual, pilot-scale technologies into operational production systems and establish new agribusinesses that will be lead by entrepreneurs in rural communities.
Two private businesses, Cyanosun Energy and Prairie AquaTech, formed around SDSU licensed research will lease space upon the center’s completion. Prairie AquaTech produces aquaculture feed ingredients by converting plant-derived carbohydrates, such as soybean and dried distillers’ grain with solubles, into high-quality and highly concentrated protein.
Funding for the center comes from several sources including a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration.
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Sidebar 2
Market Dynamics Favor More Domestic Aquaculture Production
Fish and seafood is the United States’ largest food import. China is by far the largest aquaculture producer and the largest exporter of aquaculture products. That could change according to Max Holtzman, senior advisor to the United States Secretary of Agriculture. In an op-ed piece, Holtzman says there is a shift in dynamics affecting aquaculture exports from Asia to the United States.
“First, as populations and incomes in Asian countries rise and improve, there is a corresponding increase in demand for proteins. This translates to more aquaculture products staying in the Asian region to meet domestic demand,” he states. “Second, dynamics of the “value of the dollar” deem it less attractive to export to the United States.” Furthermore, he predicts there will be a market for U.S. aquaculture because there is an almost insatiable demand for U.S. agricultural products because of their safety, high quality and supply-reliability.
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Potential Captions/Extra Facts:
Brown_O1.JPG or Brown_03.JPG: Various formulations of the pelleted fish feed made from microbial conversion soybean meal (MCSBM) are being evaluated in nutrition trials with yellow perch and rainbow trout at SDSU. The cost of MCSBM is expected to be about half that of fishmeal and one-fourth less than soy protein concentrates made by other processes.
Brown_27.JPG: With support from SDSRPC, SDSU was able to double the number of fish tanks in its facility from 90 to 180. The tanks are part of six recirculating aquaculture systems.
Brown_33.JPG or Brown_34.JPG: Michael Brown, a fisheries scientist at South Dakota State University and a student check on the yellow perch that are part of a fish nutrition study that evaluates soy-based ingredients. The aquaculture research is being funded by the South Dakota soybean checkoff.
Extra:
New soy formulations that replace up to 50 percent of the fishmeal in feed for many marine farmed species, and 100 percent of the fishmeal for many freshwater-farmed species have raised the sustainability quotient of aquafeeds immensely.
The United Nations estimates that world aquaculture production in 2010 was 59.9 million tons, with a worldwide market value of $119 billion.
The top three aquaculture-producers in 2010 were China (36.7 million tons), India (4.6 million tons) and Vietnam (2.7 million tons).
The U.S. had a trade deficit approaching $11 billion for seafood products in 2011.