Aquafeeds

Select pelleting equipment that best fits plant layout from vendors that specialize in drying and cooling, rather than buying complete “packages” from one supplier. 

Maturation diets for shrimp broodstock often include fresh food organisms like squid, bloodworms and fish, which is labor-intensive and involves quality and safety issues. 

Knowledge of the fatty acid nutrition requirements in Pacific white shrimp, an economically important penaeid for shrimp farming in the Americas, is limited. 

Cottonseed meal is a lower-cost protein alternative to soybean meal, but its use in commercial shrimp feeds may be limited because it contains gossypol. 

When feed pellets exit the die of a pelleting mill, they are moved to a post-pellet cooker or post-conditioner, where they are allowed to set prior to cooling or drying. 

To produce a high-quality feed with specific nutritional and physical characteristics, feed equipment processes must often be modified and optimized. 

Successful weaning of marine fish larvae from live feeds onto dry diets is a demanding process that requires hard work, patience and experience.  

With decreasing prices and increasing raw-material costs, efforts to reduce shrimp feed costs and improve management top the agenda for most farmers. 

Pelleting mills, where finely ground and conditioned meal are mechanically pressed through a die, produce cost-effective, high-density, water-stable shrimp feeds. 

Penaeid shrimp are unable to bio-synthesize cholesterol, which is widely accepted as an essential nutrient for these crustaceans. 

Studies at the Thad Cochran National Warmwater Aquaculture Center show that adding menhaden oil to catfish diets can produce fillets with more omega-3s. 

One potential substitute for fish oil in aquafeeds is palm oil, which is the second most abundant vegetable oil in the world. 

An important limiting factor to the inclusion of some vegetable ingredients in aquafeeds is the presence of toxic secondary compounds, or antinutrients, in the ingredients. 

Aquafeed study showed that an experimental diet with low levels of vegetable replacements for marine ingredients still produced acceptable results. 

Research in culture systems without water exchange indicates that dietary protein levels have great impact on dissolved inorganic nitrogen loading.