Food costs have been skyrocketing in recent years. According to the USDA, the price of foods purchased for home consumption increased more than 25% in 4 years, and the rising cost of ingredients, shipping, and labor means that this trend will only continue.
The number of plates to be filled will also only grow as our population grows. Addressing this need for more food, and more affordable foods, requires that new ways be found to produce food as efficiently as possible, without compromising nutritional value, accessibility, animal welfare, or environmental impact.
Animal protein production is highly inefficient, resource intensive, and costly.
Producing 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of beef requires 13 kg of grain and 30 kg of hay, which in turn require 200,000 liters of water to grow. To put it another way, producing the beef for a quarter pound (0.11 kg) hamburger patty requires 4.73 kg of food inputs and 22,000 liters of water.
To meet the human population’s growing protein needs, more sustainable sources of protein must be found.
Aquaculture is the most efficient means of producing animal protein. However, farmed fish require omega-3s that are getting harder to source.
While beef requires 43 kg of inputs to yield 1 kg of meat, farmed salmon require less than 1.2 kg of fishfeed to produce 1 kg of salmon. But fish oil and meal, two of the most critical ingredients in fishfeed, are getting harder to find. They are sourced from wild fish stocks which are increasingly reaching or exceeding maximum harvest capacity. Fishfeed producers can’t pull more fish out of the ocean.
Consequently, the amount of fish oil and fish meal used in fishfeed has been dramatically reduced. In Norway, the largest producer of farmed Atlantic salmon in the world, the percentage of fish oil and meal used in fishfeed declined from 90% in 1990 to less than 25% in 2015.
This has had consequences. These newer feeds have less omega-3 fatty acids and more omega-6 fatty acids, an excess of which can promote tissue inflammation and other negative health concerns. As a result, farmed fish now grow more slowly, have higher mortality rates, and have less nutritional value.
For aquaculture—and the supply of efficiently produced animal protein—to grow, new sources of omega-3s must be developed and scaled.
Aquaterra Advanced Omega-3 Canola oil is an ethical and sustainable alternative to fish oil, and the world’s first plant-based source of DHA.
Aquaterra is produced from Omega-3 Canola—the result of 20 years of scientific collaboration between Nuseed and Australian researchers—making it the world’s first plant-based source of total omega-3 nutrition, including DHA.
Aquaterra is a safe and effective means of increasing the omega-3 content of fishfeed, enhancing the nutritional content of filets:
- It has been shown in 18 months of clinical trials involving 3 million fish to be an effective replacement for fish oil.
- Research conducted by the NOFIMA, Havforskningsinstituttet, and the Norwegian Seafood Research Fund has shown that salmon fed Aquaterra have normal growth and survival rates, improved skin and muscle color, and increased omega-3 content.
- Aquaterra is Friend of the Sea® certified because it reduces pressure on marine environments, making it the first biotechnology in the world to achieve certification from the World Sustainability Organization.
- Aquaterra is approved for use in aquafeeds in the USA, Canada, Australia, Chile, New Zealand, and in Norway as well, making it the first biotechnology product authorized for use by the Norwegian Food Safety Authority.
- More than 300,000 metric tonnes of commercially farmed fish have been fed with Aquaterra to date.
Aquaterra is uniquely positioned to help ease dependency on the world’s supply of fish oil—which is constrained to 900,000 to 1 million tonnes per year—and facilitate the sustainable growth of aquaculture. Just 5% of current canola crop land is needed to produce enough Omega-3 Canola oil to replace all the fish oil needed for the worldwide production of Atlantic salmon by 2030.
Aquaterra is the ethical innovation needed by aquaculture, and being used in aquaculture right now, to meet the challenge of sustainably providing a growing population with better, more sustainable nutrition.