When innovation pays off
Innovation is the way forward when the goal is to advance our industry towards more efficient, sustainable and profitable business practices.
For many decades, the research and development community has provided substantial results and ground-breaking novelty to deliver on this goal. Yet, in these difficult times, where the world experiences one crisis after the other, trust in applied science is more important than ever as it pays off to be on the forefront.
The global aquaculture industry is going through extremely difficult times. The COVID-19 crisis started a circle of unexpected and undesired incident. This was followed by extreme price increases on raw materials and energy, as well as a lack of availability of key raw materials. On top, a war on European grounds and its consequences are giving us all very difficult times.
While the current situation of the world gives business-critical difficulties to all of us, we should be aware of what science and innovation have delivered over the past decades. Years of hard work and experience have brought a tremendous amount of knowledge on fish nutrition, feed formulation, and on raw materials to cover the nutritional needs of the species to feed. In the light of this knowledge and experience, we have developed feed concept tools and systems that contribute to minimize the damage that may arise to fish farming operations and get us through these difficult times.
Tailoring the performance of your feeds
When BioMar created the Performance Concept it was pioneering the industry. This concept has dramatically changed the way aquafeeds are formulated. According to the Performance Concept, a targeted level of fish performance is achieved by optimising the feed according to nutrient requirements of the fish. Moreover, formulation is no longer based on crude protein and fat but on fixed digestible protein and digestible energy levels, as this is what the fish can actually utilise. This allows product developers to switch between a larger variety of raw materials to secure a stable performance at the best price.
This way, they can avoid being stuck with overly expensive protein and energy sources. In addition, focusing on digestible nutrients – and thus nutrients available to the fish - guarantees stable performance while formulating on crude nutrient values do not allow the same stability.
Decades ago, when the Performance Concept was introduced, the industry faced another raw materials crisis with highly fluctuating raw materials prices, and the Performance Concept became a substantial tool to face the crisis. This feed formulation concept is still successfully used formulating our feeds around the world.
Since 2019, we have further developed and transformed the concept into its advanced version, the P 3.0 Concept that is applied in the formulation of feeds, primarily for sea bass and sea bream in the Mediterranean area.
The P 3.0 Concept has multifaceted benefits. What makes the P.3 Concept so relevant to today’s challenges is its ability to better adapt the business objectives of the farmers to changing market situations. The objective can be maximising biomass in a market where fish prices go beyond expectations or minimising the production costs in a market situation where fish prices are below expectations – indeed just like what we experience in the marketplace today.
Today, we utilise the P 3.0 Concept to make the necessary adjustments in the recipes of our feeds. It has become one of the best tools we have in BioMar to meet the challenging availability and price levels of raw materials.
The benefits of science and innovation are not limited to our formulation tools. The raw material basket that we can use in aquafeeds is getting larger every single day. In BioMar, we continuously assess, map, and steer our raw material portfolio to create multiple feed solutions for farmers. While the novel ingredients market is evolving at its own pace, there are solutions which are already available and that have efficiently been used in large scale for decades.
Read the full story and read more about BioMar's sustainability initiatives in our 2023 Sustainability Report.