What are fishmeal and fish oil, and why are they used in aquaculture feed?
Fishmeal is a powder obtained after cooking, pressing, drying, and grinding fresh raw fish, while fish oil is a liquid extracted from cooked fish. Both are obtained from catching populations of small, bony, and fast-growing short-lived and blue-blue fish for which there is little or no demand for human consumption. By-products or offcuts from seafood processing are increasingly contributing to the production of fishmeal and fish oil.
With excellent nutritional value and high levels of polyunsaturated fats, they are among the most nutritious and digestible ingredients for feed and aquaculture species. As such, they are recognized as providing health benefits to farm animals and consumers of these products. These marine ingredients are currently in good supply, but are also in very high demand from multiple sectors, which is why Skretting conducts extensive ingredient R+D at the Skretting Aquaculture Research Centre (ARC). In fact, Skretting can produce food that does not contain any marine ingredients.
