A year ago I wrote about Dragon Feeds — a Welsh company headed by Tony Smith — that had developed what it believed was a sustainable alternative to fishmeal using Nereis Virens polychaetes, a species of sea worm.
Dragon’s feed was being used by several trout farmers and had been endorsed by a supermarket chain as well as a number of high profile chefs and restaurateurs. But its acceptance only went so far, and Smith was particularly frustrated by the lack of ratification from the aqua-feed industry as a whole and by some of the sector’s bigger players who had been dismissive of both the product and the grow-out results it had been achieving.
Apart from being rebranded as Blue Marine Feeds (BMF), not much has changed in the last 12 months. But that is extremely likely to change in the near future. In fact, BMF believes it stands on the brink of something very big following a recent independent, 12-week “blind trial” of its feed at a location in the United States that the company said “went even better than it had hoped it would.”
The full results of the trial will be published in a few weeks, but Smith was able to reveal a few details to SeafoodSource. It was funded by a large global food brand, which for the time being cannot be named, and was coordinated by a leading professor of animal and veterinary science, considered to be an expert in animal nutrition, specifically fish nutrition, who must also remain nameless at present, prior to publication of the results.
“This was a comprehensive trial with full data, analysis, blood testing, digestibility, and so on. It’s a trial that I would have never been able to afford,” said Smith. “In the past perhaps we have lacked data, but this brand wants sustainability and was prepared to sponsor the whole thing.”
BMF produced five diets and these were put to the test on 50-gram trout and benchmarked against a high-quality fishmeal diet (containing about 35 percent fishmeal). BMF’s diets of course contained no fishmeal whatsoever but had varying levels of polychaete content because the researchers wanted to see if the worms made a difference at different inclusion rates.
“What we already knew was that if you take the polychaetes out, our feed doesn’t work,” said Smith. “They wanted to see at what level they made a difference. Actually, what the trial discovered was that while the polychaetes were essential, the level of polychaetes made little difference. Even the lowest level gave enough benefits for the fish to make it worthwhile.
“This means our polychaetes could go a lot further than we thought,” he said. “Every one of the polychaete diets scored higher than the fishmeal diet. The growth rate on the trout along with the high digestibility that comes with our feed impressed the people trialling the feed so much that it was queried whether a growth hormone was present, which it wasn’t.”
The trout were weighed every four weeks and on the final weigh-in the five BMF diets had a weight gain from 301 grams to 319 grams. BMF’s best weight gain formulation was 55 grams ahead of the fishmeal-only diet.
At the end of the trial, the exact formulations of BMF’s five feeds were revealed to the trial team and they became very excited, said Smith.
“I don’t think anyone else in the world has grown fish that way with a non-fishmeal diet,” he said.
The trial team also confirmed that if the feed works on trout, it can work on a number of finfish species, including farmed salmon, sea bass and sea bream. In fact, the formulation for bass and bream would be closer to that of trout than it would for salmon, said Smith.
He said there’s already “a lot of buzz” about the trial with interested parties keen to learn more.
“We’ve had a number of phone calls and visits but we can’t say much until the results are published,” said Smith, who added that he’d love the data to be published “like yesterday.”
“The fact is to get a land-based protein to work as well, if not better, than fishmeal will have a huge impact. And we can produce this feed for the same price or cheaper than a comparative fishmeal-based diet,” he explained.
And to the feed’s naysayers, Smith said: “We can’t be ignored or swept under the carpet anymore. I think there’s going to be an awful lot happening with this in the very near future — it really can bring about change, whether as a complete or partial substitution for fishmeal. There’s going to be an exciting couple of months ahead.”
