Soybean industry plans aquaculture promotion
February 12, 2014 | 07:53 PM
SEATTLE — The United States needs to develop a much larger aquaculture industry based on feeding fish soybeans and other plants to meet the growing demand for fish in the United States and other countries in the coming years.
That is the provocative goal of the Coalition for U.S. Seafood Production, a soybean-industry led group whose formation was announced here this week on the sidelines of the World Aquaculture Society meeting.
The coalition, to be known by the acronym CUSP, is an outgrowth of the Soy Aquaculture Alliance, which has been funded for several years by the United Soybean Board and state checkoffs, to create a bigger market for fish food made from soybeans.
Steven Hart
“We believe establishing relationships and building connections among soy, aquaculture and seafood value chain stakeholders is crucial to helping aquaculture catch on,” said Steven Hart, the executive director of the Indiana-based Soy Aquaculture Alliance. “This is imperative as wild-capture fish production cannot sustainably meet the rising global demand for seafood in the decades ahead.”
There is already a substantial market for plant-based fish food in the U.S. catfish and farm-raised trout and tilapia industries, but the big market for soybean-based fish food is overseas in Chile, Norway and developing countries where big fish farms are located.
CUSP, whose members include the soybean industry, aquaculture farmers, customers such as Darden Restaurants and academics involved in fish research, will encourage the executive branch and Congress to help expand U.S. aquaculture, Hart said.
The coalition’s goals are supported by a recent report by the World Bank, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Food Policy Research Institute predicting that by 2030, 62 percent of fish for human food will come from aquaculture because fish catches in the wild are expected to level off amid rising demand for low-cost protein from a growing middle class, especially in China.
The FAO also found that the United States has some of the world’s best potential locations for offshore fish farming.
But U.S. aquaculture faces a range of regulatory issues involving the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the Agriculture Department’s various research agencies, Interior’s Fish and Wildlife Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. State and local governments are also involved in permitting fish farms.
Environmentalists often ring alarm bells about the dangers of fish farming due to pollution and escapes, but the Monterey Bay Aquarium, whose seafood watch advises consumers on what fish to eat, has endorsed it as long as production standards are high. (See story below.)
Aquaculture industry officials, meanwhile, warn that if authorities in the United States do not approve facilities, the industry will expand in other countries where permitting is easier.
Lobbying to date
The coalition has already met with Obama administration officials and with some members of Congress, and says it has convinced the administration to create a place for aquaculture in a new oceans policy.
Hart said that although the group was told that there would be no specific mention of aquaculture in the policy, when the report came out three weeks later, it was included in several places.
“As a group we are not doing enough to encourage aquaculture development,” Hart said. “Members of Congress say they have never heard about it and ask why the industry is not doing more.”
Hart said the coalition’s goals include finalizing a fishery management plan for marine aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico, reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevenson Marine Fisheries Management Act, which guides NOAA’s activities related to aquaculture, and declaration of aquaculture as a “specialty crop” in the next farm bill, which would qualify it for certain Agriculture Department programs.
Michael Rubino, director of NOAA’s Office of Aquaculture, said his agency is primarily focused on managing fishing in federal waters, but that as aquaculture is becoming more popular, fishermen are becoming less resistant and environmentalists have begun to see it as a solution rather than a problem.
“These things are building a base of support for what you collectively would like to do in marine aquaculture,” he said.
But Rubino told the coalition members that if they want NOAA to pay more attention to their industry, they will have to lobby for it.
“It is not that my management is opposed to agriculture, it’s ‘get in line.’ If they hear from Congress, that is different,” he said.
Beverly Paul, a lobbyist for the American Soybean Association, said Washington officials had regarded soybean farmers lobbying on aquaculture development more as “a curiosity” than a lobbying force, but that the group had made remarkable progress in the past year.
Paul also noted that aquaculture enthusiasts should be aware that the soybean industry faces two short-term challenges outside aquaculture: EPA’s proposal to limit the mandate for biodiesel production and FDA’s proposal to ban transfats, which could lead to the replacement of soybean oil with palm oil.
“When one sector is challenged, the rest of the industry needs to step forward,” Paul said.
Successes, opportunities and challenges
Aquaculture has expanded so rapidly that the price of soymeal has risen from $200 per metric ton to almost $1,000 per ton, Bill Bayliss, an Ohio soybean grower who is vice chair of the Soy Aquaculture Alliance, told members of the alliance during a three-hour meeting here on Tuesday.
“Soy is the No. 1 global aquafeed,” added Mike Beard, a Frankfurt, Ind., soybean farmer and director of the United Soybean Board.
Beard said the USB wants to increase the value of soybeans by funding research on fish that can be bred in captivity, for which hatchery technology is fully developed, that will eat pelleted feed at an early stage and throughout its life, are tolerant of crowding, and for which there is a good market demand.
USB has already paid for research on cages in which to grow fish and for feed research, he noted.
There also would appear to be many geographical opportunities for the coalition’s goal of expanding the farming of other fish off the coast of the United States as well as in ponds and tanks.
James Kapetsky, a former FAO official now based in Wilmington, N.C., explained the FAO aquaculture study that showed the United States to be one of the prime locations for the development of offshore aquaculture, which is known as mariculture.
Kapetsky said these facilities are likely to be located within 25 nautical miles of ports so that they can have access to shore services and maintenance.
Mariculture, he said, could be located off the shores of continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the territories of the Northern Marianas, Johnston Atoll, Howland and Wake Island, American Samoa, Palmyra atoll and Jarvis Island.
But Kapetsky acknowledged that FAO has not published model guidelines, which could help the development in waters farther out than three miles.
Alan Cook, representing Icicle Seafoods, a Seattle-based provider of seafood, explained the successes and challenges of aquaculture.
Cook said his company has had an aquaculture operation for 30 years that supplements its wild fish business. Icicle, which raises Atlantic salmon and coho salmon in Puget Sound and in Chile, has found no conflict with its wild fish business because customers buy both wild and farm-raised fish.
The United States imported 277 million pounds of farmed salmon in 2013 and the air freight bill was $180 million, Cook said. Most of that salmon could be produced in the United States, Cook said, but community officials need to be convinced aquaculture is a good industry.
Cook said he sees aquaculture as an ideal industry for impoverished coastal communities where logging has been reduced, but that when local officials think about economic development they want to attract high-tech firms or tourism.
But the coastal communities aren’t usually close enough to international airports and don’t have the skilled workforce to attract those companies. Tourism wages are low, he noted, while his company “pays more than a living wage.”
He also said that aquaculture developers have to realize that politics in the coastal communities is often dominated by elderly owners of second homes who don’t want any interference with their homes or views, and are beyond the age in which they are concerned with economic development or schools, he said.
“The only real obstacles to keeping this investment in the U.S. are regulatory,” he added.
NOAA’s Rubino said, however, that he believes the biggest issues are “political and social concerns,” because federal permits are not needed unless aquaculture involves farming federally-managed fish in federal waters.
Bob Miller of Pentair Aquatic Eco-Systems, a Florida company that makes aquaculture equipment, said he sees aquaponics in cities that are developing urban agriculture as a niche market.
Dietary challenges
Fish researchers say that the conversion of farm-raised fish from a diet of smaller fish to a plant-based diet is inevitable because there has been a steady decline in the availability of fish meal, which is derived from menhaden, an oily and bony fish not considered fit for human consumption, and anchovies and sardines.
But the conversion still has its challenges.
At the meeting, several researchers explained their projects to find the best mix of soybeans, corn and fishmeal for several species of fish. If the food is not digestible by the fish, one researcher explained, they get diarrhea.
They also discussed the fishes’ need for taurine, an organic acid present in meat and fish but not in plants, and their work to expand species that will eat plant-based food to include pompano and other fishes.
Jeff Silverstein, the national program leader for aquaculture at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, said one ARS goal is “to make salmon as efficient as the rainbow trout.”
Silverstein also noted that the National Institute for Food and Agriculture will soon announce a competitive grants program in aquaculture.
The future of catfish
Perhaps the biggest surprise of the meeting was that both Silverstein and Hart see a brighter future for U.S. catfish, whose production has declined in recent years in the face of increased foreign competition and production problems, and their consumption of soybeans.
Catfish, Silverstein said, “eat a lot of soybeans … they don’t have a problem with soybeans,” but he noted that the industry has declined by about half in recent years.
But he added, “I think the potential for growth is really tremendous. I see an increase in demand globally. From a biological and production perspective I think the future is bright.”
Hart said catfish have been “suffering” globally, even in Vietnam. But catfish is recognized as “a low-cost protein,” he said, and new technology could make up for the increased cost of feed.
“In China they value U.S. catfish because they trust it,” Hart said.
