Bacteria Making Fish Farming More Sustainable

A group of scientists has developed FeedKind, a new form of fish feed made from bacteria that uses no agricultural land and requires very little water. 

Wild seafood is disappearing rapidly, and many consumers have turned to farmed fish as a way to help reverse the trend.

But finding a sustainable source of food for carnivorous fish such as salmon and tuna — which rank as the second and third most popular types of seafood in America — has been a persistent challenge for aquaculture producers.

Now, a group of scientists have developed a new form of fish feed that uses no agricultural land and requires very little water.

It’s called FeedKind, and it’s made from bacteria that eats methane and turns it into energy.

This approach is promising because for a long time fish farms merely fed these fish a diet consisting of wild "forage" fish and oil derived from wild fish.

But it often took several pounds of wild fish to produce 1 pound of farmed fish, making it a loss for the oceans.

In recent years, the aquaculture industry turned to feed based on corn, soy and wheat, usually using dried distiller grains.

While these solutions are often better for the oceans, they also rely heavily on agricultural land, much in the way other animal feed does. Similarly, they rely on the use of pesticides and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which contribute to "dead zones" in the ocean.

"We’re taking carbon from outside the food chain, which frees up more food for humans," said Josh Silverman, founder and chief products officer of Calysta, a biotech startup in Silicon Valley. "And we’re turning methane into a higher value product."

Calysta stated FeedKind could address sustainability problems plaguing aquaculture, which the Food and Agricultural Organization found is one of the fastest-growing agricultural industries worldwide.

After raking in $30 million of capital from investors in a third round of funding — including animal feed giant Cargill — since December, Calysta is readying a R&D plant in England that plans to manufacture FeedKind at pilot scale by the end of this year. It’s also hoping to get a North American commercial production facility online by 2018.

FeedKind is made by first dissolving methane in water with the bacteria (methanotrophs commonly found in the top layer of soil). The bacteria gobbles up the methane molecules.

After the mixture is fermented, the protein produced from this process is extruded and formed into pellets.

"People have known about this bacteria for years," said Silverman, who holds a doctorate from Stanford in biotechnology and comes from the biopharmaceutical industry.

"But no one had thought about how to use them in industrial applications."

The alternative fish feed originally was developed over a decade ago by Norferm, a Norwegian company that won approval to sell FeedKind in the European Union. After Calysta acquired the company in 2014, Silverman said he refined the fermenting process.

Norferm only tested the product in salmon. But Silverman claims that FeedKind also could be used to feed other carnivorous fish such as halibut, sea bass, sea bream, eel and shrimp — perhaps even terrestrial livestock and pigs, he added.

Source: Green Biz

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Taxonomy

• Bacteria
• Fish Farming
• Sustainability
• Food Standards
• Fish Food