Title : Suitability of conventional ingredients used for aquafeed production in Kenya
Abstract:
The ambitious aquaculture production targets aim at producing 1,000,000 mt, 700,000 mt, 50,000 mt and 160,000 mt in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda, respectively by 2030;this therefore calls for increased fish feed production however fisheries value chain is challenged by limited access to quality fish feeds that are commercially competitive and environmentally friendly. Small scale fish farmers are limited by high feed cost and logistics associated with feed importation, that limit their access to quality feeds. Accordingly, there is growing interest to promote backyard aquafeed formulation. Traditionally feed formulation focuses on nutrient composition (more so proximate composition) and cost of feed ingredients, and pay less attention to several factors that affect sustainability, including pollution potential, environmental/ecological impacts, competing uses, socio-cultural considerations, yield and fertilizer requirements among others.
We examined a broad range of factors that may affect the suitability of a feed ingredient (including those related to environment, nutrition content and utilization, unit nutrient cost, and socio-economics among others) for five commonly used protein ingredients (i.e., fishmeal, bone meal, soya bean meal, sunflower meal and cotton seed meal), and four conventional energy ingredients (i.e., maize bran, sorghum grain, wheat bran and rice bran) in Kenya. The results indicated that soya bean and cotton seed meals are the most viable plant-based protein ingredients compared to sunflower meal average. Among the animal-based protein ingredients, omena fish meal out performed bone meal. However, continued use of fishmeal in feed formulation seems unsustainable because of the allied ecological and environmental impacts. Maize bran remains the most viable energy ingredient, outperforming wheat bran, rice bran and sorghum, respectively. Overall, animal ingredients are the most suitable protein sources for farmed fish species. However, their use is associated with ecological and environmental impacts that culminate into outstanding negative impacts to the aquatic ecosystem than plant proteins ingredients.
Keywords: fish feed production, high feed cost, backyard aqua feed, preference, neglected factors
