A new project has replaced fishmeal with an alternative marine protein source to investigate gut health and growth performance benefits in meat chickens.
The Innovate UK project, ‘Farmed Marine Proteins for Poultry Feed’, assessed the feasibility of using artemia meal – Artemeal – as a novel protein source to replace fishmeal for young broilers to monitor their health and growth as well as reduce environmental impact.
Aquanzo, a feed company, has joined forces with Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) and the UK Agri-Tech Centre with an aim to offer the animal feed industry an alternative ingredient to fishmeal and offer a long-term solution to the current marine protein ingredient crisis.
Marine ingredients, in the form of fishmeal, are one of the best sources of nutrients for young farm animals.
However, fishing has a significant impact on the environment. Additionally, the animal feed sector, as well as broiler meat production, has grown over recent decades, while marine ingredients harvests have been stagnating for the past 40 years, which has driven up costs to the extent it is no longer being used in poultry rations.
To address the core marine protein availability problem with a long-term solution — as opposed to producing alternative ingredients — Aquanzo is developing technologies to sustainably produce the marine zooplankton ‘artemia’ at scale and on land and process it into marine protein ingredients for the animal feed industry.
The company said the project would benefit the compound feed manufacturers by offering access to like-for-like or even better products than fishmeal, which can be tailored, sustainably produced and of constant quality.
At the industrial scale, Aquanzo is forecasting production capacity of thousands of tonnes of Artemeal per year at scale.
The production volume in the next five years would supplement over 10% of the entire UK poultry starter diets (for chicks), feeding over 100m birds.
Remi Gratacap, chief executive of Aquanzo, said: “This project came together thanks to an amazing team who made it all run smoothly.
“We showed that fishmeal can successfully be upgraded with locally farmed marine ingredients in chick diets, proving a sustainable long-term solution to harvesting wild resources.”
Lee Cocker, Project Manager at UK Agri-Tech Centre, said: “This has been an important and fascinating project and I am extremely proud to have been part of a team that has made such positive advances.
Jos Houdijk and Marwa Hussein, researchers at SRUC, said: “It was great to observe that birds fed Artemeal during the first days of life outperformed those fed fishmeal and that this carried through to being heavier at harvest.
“These benefits concurred with beneficial impacts on gut microbiome and immune organs, suggesting a great future of Artemeal for robust, resilient poultry production.”