People are eating more fish than ever and the resulting pressure on ocean fisheries is causing a significant sustainability challenge. U.S. soybean producers are working on solutions to ensure a reliable supply of fish products by providing high-quality feed to aquaculture operations, helping to decrease pressure on ocean-capture fisheries.
U.S. soybean meal provides an important source of cost effective, renewable protein ingredients for fish feeds in aquaculture. This helps increase sustainability in two ways: by reducing reliance on using marine species for aquaculture feed and by providing high-nutrition, high-efficiency food ingredients that are also a renewable resource.
Traditional aquaculture operations often use meal made from marine species as a feed ingredient. Reliance on marine-based feed ingredients can adversely impact the environment and production is not increasing, limiting growth of traditional aquaculture operations. On the other hand, soybean meal is a renewable resource that can be produced in a range of protein levels to suit the needs of the aquaculture industry. It also has the best amino acid complex of all of the plant protein ingredients used in feeds for the majority of fish species cultured globally, such as cultured fish and shrimp species.
Availability of renewable protein products will be critical to the future of the global aquaculture industry and U.S. soy delivers on helping meet that need.
Source: http://www.soyaqua.org/quickfacts.html
