Monday, October 11, 2010

Fishy News

My most recent ARS e-newsletter was very fish-based, including both an article on feeding fish to fish, and also the benefits of fish for humans. Now, I love eating fish. But I don't love the smell and taste (yes, I've tasted it) of fish meal. What better population to feed fish byproducts to than the ones who already consume fish byproducts naturally: the fish? In small quantities this represents a great opportunity to utilize byproducts to produce food.

In other news, Stephen Colbert branched into agriculture again this past week when he decided to discuss the government crackdown on raw milk sales.

3 comments:

  1. We had a speaker in my grad seminar today who talked a lot about aquaculture, and apparently fish meal is a very common feedstuff used in Norwegian fish farms. The only problem is that it's pretty expensive, so he's actually doing research on feeding distillers' grains to fish.

    So how much distillers' is actually available in Norway? Not much at all; it's imported. This leads to an interesting but unrelated point: Norway is a salmonella-free country. Every time they receive a shipment of distillers' (or anything that could carry salmonella), a sample for testing has to be sent to the country ahead of the shipment. If it's positive, the shipment cannot be unloaded.

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  2. Did you see the ADSA article about the distillers' limit on usage?

    http://www.feedstuffs.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=F4D1A9DFCD974EAD8CD5205E15C1CB42&nm=Daily+News&type=news&mod=News&mid=A3D60400B4204079A76C4B1B129CB433&tier=3&nid=67A4F84917D5419D80A66A2D3846C36A

    And yes, fish meal is very very expensive. It has very little practical use as a feedstuff right now in the dairy industry because of its price.

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  3. Yeah, I saw that, and researchers continue to pour money into figuring out how to feed as much of it as possible. The good news is if the tax credit isn't renewed, corn prices will go down, and producers should be able to afford to feed it at higher levels than they are now.

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