Husbandry Practice
February 8th, 2009
How fish and other products are grown is important to the consumer and to government agencies that regulate aquaculture. Husbandry practices affect how farming transforms resources into products and the quality of the products that result. Issues of animal welfare, sustainability of feed components, and the impact on water quality are topics that are constantly being evaluated in the aquaculture industry.
The most important facet of aquatic animal culture, like other forms of animal husbandry, is feeding. Feeding if of central importance to the ecology of both wild and cultured fish growing systems. For the fish farmer, optimal conversion of feed is perhaps the most important technical objective because minimal feed conversion ratios correlate closely with the overall efficiency of aquaculture systems. Aquaculturalists abhor the waste of feed for reasons of economic self-interest and advocate cost-effective formulation of feeds for fish.
Genetics and animal breeding are, in the long term, a fundamental part of animal husbandry. Fish farmers employ conventional breeding techniques to produce animals with faster growth rates, better feed conversion, and improved harvest yield. In the future, we can expect that genetic engineering techniques such as cloning and gene splicing to create genetically modified organisms will be available for aquaculture applications. We will carefully observe developments in this technology and adopt new breeding practices only when they are legally permissible and clearly beneficial and acceptable to the consumer.
