Back to nature larval feed
NORWEGIAN biotechnology company CFeed specialises in start-up feeds, imitating nature’s solution, where fish larvae eat micro plankton.
From its land-based facility near Trondheim, CFeed produces copepod eggs and live copepods for hatcheries worldwide.
Production is in large automated tanks, which can produce high density cultures all year, quickly responding according to the market demand.
At customers’ hatcheries the copepods can be easily hatched with existing equipment and fed directly to the fish fry.
They can be used as functional feed in combination with live feed solutions, or they can replace current live feed solutions.
CFeed was set up in 2014, after researchers at Sintef Ocean saw a problem with early stage larvae survival in the early 2000s.
Today, the company has performed more than 30 trials with 16 different species in 15 countries to confirm the product’s strength.
For all species it says it has shown 30 to 50 per cent better survival when using CFeed’s solution, working in particular with sea bream, tuna, turbot, ballan wrasse, and cod, among others.
Chief technology officer Ole Andreas Moum Lo told delegates that CFeed was passionate about early development because this determines the future performance of the fish.
‘If you have a healthy and good juvenile, you will get a good healthy fish in the end.’
The company works with salmon, though it feeds ballan wrasse rather than salmon – helping out with the sea lice problem said Lo.
‘Breeding ballan wrasse is not straightforward and the industry has been struggling with survival rates of zero to 10 per cent.’
But CFeed is working with farmers to increase survival and stabilise it on a higher level.
In cod, they have seen increased weights of 20 per cent after a year, with fish only fed copepods for the first two weeks – ‘we can see the larvae quality has a tremendous effect on the long term performance of the fish’.
With sea bream producers in the Mediterranean, there have been 40 per cent weight increases.
And they are also collaborating with Japanese academics at Kindai University to develop fast growing species, such as seriola and tuna- increasing survival rates by 300 per cent.
‘The copepod effect is incredible and has the potential to disrupt marine aquaculture,’ said Lo, who estimates global market potential at 250 million euros.
CFeed has focused on the Norwegian market so far, but has trials scheduled in Ecuador and Thailand for shrimp, and further work on seriola, sea bream and snapper. Lo said the company sees shrimp and sea bream as the main markets of the future.
The company has now stabilised production and has recurrent sales. In the next years, it expects the market to grow fast, and to be able to respond, it is planning to increase its production capacity and improve the existing production system.