Aquanzo explores sustainable marine-based poultry feed alternative

Agri-EPI and Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) visited Rastech Research CIC at the University of St Andrews in Scotland for a partner site visit to Aquanzo Production System facilities.

During this visit, attendees received an introduction to RASTech, followed by a detailed tour of the Aquanzo system. The team also met the production team, saw the new artemia grow-out system in action and learnt more about its workings.

Aquanzo is currently running a 24-month project funded by Innovate UK-DEFRA in collaboration with Agri-EPI Centre and SRUC, that focuses on developing technologies to farm a new source of marine protein, artemia, a marine zooplankton, sustainably at scale and on land. This explores the use of different agricultural by-products to produce artemia, in turn investigating the nutritional benefits on poultry gut health, lifetime growth, and performance. Overall, this project attempts to address the damaging environmental and cost impacts of harvesting marine ingredients from the wild for use in commercial young animal feeding.

Agri-EPI’s Lee Cocker, Project Manager of the Farmed Marine Protein project, said:

“The opportunity for Agri-EPI to support the farming of artemia as a potential new source of marine protein is an exciting one. Helping the project gain traction and witnessing the ramping up of its production system has been brilliant. It is great to read so many positive articles about the project across the aquaculture and livestock feed sectors.”

At the industrial scale, Aquanzo is forecasting production capacity of thousands of metric tonnes of artemia meal per year per industrial facility. Agri-EPI guides this project by providing life cycle analysis, measuring the environmental sustainability at each stage of its development, in addition to project management.