Comment
BY DR MARTIN JAFFA
Chicken feed Maybe it’s time to revisit a bright idea from the 1990s?
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ndustry critics regularly refer to comments, made by the Scottish Parliament’s Rural Economy and Connectivity (REC) Committee in 2018, to the effect that that “the status quo is not an option”. In fact, when it comes to salmon farming the status quo has never been an option. From the earliest days, improvement and innovation have always been at the forefront of development, otherwise we would still be farming a few hundred tonnes of salmon in small wooden pens in the sheltered waters at the head of some Scottish lochs. The salmon farming industry has moved significantly forward from those early days. It has not all been plain sailing, however. It is only necessary to scan the pages of back issues of Fish Farmer magazine to see that innovation has not always been successful, but that is part of the learning curve in what is still a relatively new sector. Given that this issue of Fish Farmer looks at
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innovation (see feature, page 52), I thought that I would relate my own experience of trying to investigate a potentially innovative solution. In those days, there was no real help for new start-up businesses, especially when it came to innovative ideas and certainly no Dragon’s Den type of TV programme to highlight the difficulties of innovation on a limited budget. The concept of the innovation came from my time when I was working as the fish specialist for an animal nutrition and healthcare company. I was responsible for the launch of the first dedicated range of fully licensed in-feed medicines and one of the questions I began to ask was how we could ensure that all the medication administered was actually consumed by the fish. This was not a problem encountered by my colleagues specialising in other species, since medicinal feed fed to a terrestrial farm animal that is uneaten remains in the feed trough and can be seen and recorded. Back in the early 1990s, once pellets left the feed scoop, there was no guarantee they would be eaten by the fish and certainly not in sufficient quantity to produce a beneficial effect. It was clear to me that the treatment had one single requirement and that was to pass through the water column in the pen so it would become accessible to the fish. It occurred to me that the feed didn’t need to pass down through the water column but could just as equally pass up through it. Instead of feeding the treatment from the surface, why not feed from the bottom of the pen and let it rise to the surface where it would be seen by the farm staff as an indicator of whether it was consumed or not? Trout feed is manufactured to be buoyant and float on the surface. The challenge was how to get a buoyant feed down to the bottom of the pen and then release it in a controlled manner. This was the real sticking point. My eureka moment came as I wandered around the stands at the Pig and Poultry Show at the National Agricultural Showground. Food is distributed around poultry sheds by a simple system using chains and disks running through pipework. Every other link of the chain is a disk that is just smaller than the diameter of the pipe. Feed is trapped between the disks and is dragged around the pipework, filling the various feeders around the sheds. I could see that using this system, buoyant feed could be taken down to the bottom of the pen and released. This system works, but the logistics of fitting a feed delivery system
Above: Salmon Left: Chicks feeding
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10/05/2021 15:56:31
