2024 in reviewKevin Fitzsimmons

A view from Kazakhstan and Niger

2024 has seen Fitzsimmons, who is a professor at the University of Arizona, take part in projects that could help to catalyse the fledgling aquaculture sectors in Kazakhstan and Niger, where he’s been invited to suggest how aquaculture elements can be added to agribusiness masters programmes with local universities.

“I’ve talked to two people in Kazakhstan who want to get more into sturgeon farming on the Caspian Sea. I think it's a great opportunity. There are good water resources in a lot of the country. They have access to good wild broodstock and the Caspian. They've got some rudimentary aquaculture skills, but they're really behind on getting up to speed on RAS and better processing of caviar product. Sturgeon and sterlets are quite popular eating, which to me is great because so many people don't realise what a good eating fish sturgeon are. I think they're one of the best fish I've eaten, and are really close to swordfish,” he reflects.

“I also visited a pretty nice tilapia farm in Niger a couple months ago. Tilapia are native, and so the people along the Niger River are very keen on eating them, but it's another place that aquaculture has kind of skipped by. Everything's pretty rudimentary. And as far as value adding processing, not much is going on even though they're close to big markets like Nigeria and Benin. So that's one thing we'll be addressing in these programmes,” he adds.

Alternative aquafeed ingredients

As chair of the F3 Feed Challenge – an initiative designed to catalyse the development of fish-free feeds – Fitzsimmons has been overseeing a contest looking at alternatives for krill in salmon diets.

“There’s lots of competing theories as to how much krill there is in the Antarctic Ocean and how much we can take without affecting the whale populations, when we throw in global warming and melting from the poles. Nobody really knows. And so, we're really trying to find some good alternative ingredients that would provide both the nutritional and the attractant values that krill certainly has,” he explains.

“We had 41 companies that sent us samples. We're working with Optimal – a group in Iowa and Nebraska that are doing land-based salmon and are able to manufacture the diets. We selected 10 of these samples, which are a mix between insect meals, algae meals, single cell proteins, mycoproteins and formulated ingredients from companies that are used to producing animal feed additives. We've already done one trial and we're doing a second trial just to confirm the results of the first one. When we get all that data, we'll crunch it down and then during the plenary session of the World Aquaculture triennial meeting in New Orleans [in March 2024] we will hand out the $100,000 prize to the winner,” he adds.

Fitzsimmons also predicts that the worldwide reduction in fishing subsidies, combined with an increased focus on ecosystem-based management, will be a great help to alternative ingredient producers, especially fish oil alternatives.

“I think that Veramaris and Corbion and their competitors are going to get more and more and more market share and continue to expand. They're going to have more product on the market in the coming year, and there are other outfits that are jumping on that bandwagon. You've also got the GMO canola people who've got oils that will compete with fish oil and the algae oil. So there's more and more of that product joining the market. And, as the farmers are more and more keen on improving their sustainability bona fides, they're going to go with the algae oils or canola oil,” he suggests.

Aquaponic momentum

Aquaponics has long been one of Fitzsimmons’ areas of interest and this year he’s been involved in developing low-cost aquaponics projects in Kenya.

“We’re still seeing a lot of interest in aquaponics both across the US and globally. I've got this other project in Kenya doing aquaponics in conjunction with some colleagues from the ARAVA Institute, in Israel, with support from the Kasser Joint Institute. The Kenyans are really keen – they eat a lot of vegetables, they eat a lot of tilapia and they're very keen on making it as sustainable as possible. So, we have a lot of interest down there and we're putting in a couple of demo projects which are going really well,” he explains.

“We're deliberately focused on doing this as sustainably and low cost as possible, so we went to some hardware stores in Kenya and checked out what's readily available: cement blocks and plastic liners for doing the growing beds for the vegetables and plastic cistern-type tanks that people would put on a house to gather rainwater are pretty much ideal for doing tank culture with tilapia. We've kept it real simple with air blowers and water pumps that can be run on a couple solar panels,” he adds.

He's also been looking to develop feeds that use ingredients that are readily available, notably black soldier fly and Azolla, an aquatic fern that many Kenyan farmers are using now to feed chickens.

“A symbiotic blue-green algae cyanobacteria grows in the Azolla and it fixes nitrogen from the air and translocates those amino acids and the proteins to the Azolla. We're grinding it up along with insect meal and using that as a replacement for the fishmeal and shrimp meal. This lowers the cost of the diet but still keeping the protein and fat levels pretty much equivalent. We're hoping this maybe could help the small farmers with a lower cost feed ingredient,” Fitzsimmons explains.

“Azolla grows naturally, but we're growing it in the effluent of the fish tanks. It grows like crazy. It doesn't pull that much nutrient out before going to the other plants because it fixes nitrogen. It's working very nicely for us so far,” he adds.

The wider sector

Looking beyond his own remit, Fitzsimmons is cautiously optimistic about land-based farming, despite ongoing setbacks.

“Some of the salmon RAS, onshore systems and hybrid systems are producing more and more fish, but and we are still seeing a few floundering ones, like AquaBounty and Atlantic Sapphire, which seem to be one step forward, two steps back. But some of the Norwegian ones, a couple of the others in the US seem to be incrementally getting better and better. So, I think that's encouraging and I think that's probably the smarter way to do it rather than start right out trying to build the biggest farm in the world,” he reflects.

He's also pleased to see that seafood certifying bodies are raising their game.

“I think tightening the governance and guidelines on certification programmes – whether it's ASC or MSC or BAP – all of these things are helping the industry progress. They're all trying to tighten standards and address some of the complaints that have come up from various groups about fish welfare or worker welfare and tightening up environmental standards, reducing the amount of fishmeal and fish oil that's in the diets. And I think in most cases that I'm aware of, the farmers are going along with it. They want to keep their sustainability records intact and they want to have continuous improvement,” he observes.

Political trepidation

While cautiously optimistic about the wider aquaculture sector, Fitzsimmons is deeply concerned about some of the plans by US president-elect, Donald Trump.

“I have real worries about our new administration putting on tariffs and really making it hard for foreign seafood to come in, whether it's wild-caught or farmed. We still import between 80 and 90 percent of our seafood. It could be very expensive for consumers and it could put a lot of stress on fisheries people and aquaculture people in other countries. It's also potentially going to be another blow to shrimp farmers, who are already trying to get out of a pretty deep hole,” he explains.

What’s more, he doesn’t see it as benefiting the US domestic seafood industry.

“Our aquaculture sector is relatively small and so much of it is based on fresh and live product. So, it might help the catfish and the tiny US-shrimp sectors a little, but not the oyster or tilapia farmers, who sell all the products live or fresh on ice into ethnic markets,” Fitzsimmons points out.

“US consumers will have to pay more when they have to cover the tariff prices. It’s going to affect the restaurant trade, as well as nursing homes and schools, which buy pangasius and tilapia, that are going to see the high tariffs,” he adds.

Fitzsimmons is also fed up with the wild-caught seafood lobby.

“In the US we've had several places declare fisheries emergencies in Alaska, South Carolina, Mississippi. And to me it's total nonsense. Salmon fishermen and shrimp fishermen complaining about farm-raised product coming in from abroad. To me it's like buffalo hunters complaining about cow farmers undercutting the price of beef. Hunter and gatherers have been having a hard time with farmers now for 5,000 years. Declaring an emergency is not going to change that they overfished. There's pollution problems, there's climate change problems, farm-raised product coming to compete with them is the least of their problems. But it gets lots of publicity and it gets support from politicians, especially now with ‘America First’ and all these kinds of slogans going around,” Fitzsimmons reflects.

Despite his concerns, Fitzsimmons is by no means downbeat about the bigger picture.

“The industry is still growing. Markets for salmon, tilapia, shrimp globally are still growing. So no, I think overall it's a pretty positive outlook for global aquaculture,” he concludes.