WEST MANSFIELD, Ohio — The oceans hold a limited amount of fish meal, and the next best protein source to feed farmed fish is soybean meal, as farmers can supply lots of soybeans.

 

As chair of the National Soy Aquaculture Alliance board (SAA), Bill Bayliss wants to promote the crop.

“I don’t have a single fish; I raise soybeans,” said Bayliss, who also serves on the Ohio Soybean Council board. “The reason I’m on the SAA board is we are trying to build our soybean market feeding fish, particularly farm fish, whether they’re in the ocean or an aquaculture containment.”

The SAA’s goals are research and promoting aquaculture, which will increase the use of soy protein, he said. It’s notable that the United States imports 85 percent of its seafood even though it has more coastline than any other country in the world. It has about the least amount of aquaculture farmed fish off that coastline.

“We don’t have net pens in the ocean because of regulations, politics, emotions and misperceptions,” Bayliss said.

It takes millions of dollars to establish a big-volume aquaculture operation, and people don’t want to do that because of the difficulty of getting permits, he explained. If there were one federal guideline so people knew what the permitting process involved, that would encourage more aquaculture in this country.

“We just got a permitting plan for the Gulf of Mexico passed a year ago,” Bayliss said. “That was a major step. We hope to see large net pens in the Gulf of Mexico eventually.”

But it is not just coastline aquaculture operations struggling in this country. “There are a few reasons why aquaculture has great potential, but there are several reasons why not just net pen aquaculture, but a lot of landlocked aquaculture, is limited as well; it has to do with regulations,” said Matthew Smith Ohio State University extension aquaculture specialist.

“If you look at worldwide aquaculture production, I don’t even think we are in the top 10 anymore for production.” Aquaculture is taking off in a lot of the Asian countries because they have much more support and far fewer environmental regulations, he said.

“Fish farmers in general, especially in the United States, are not anti-regulations people – they are just anti-over-regulation or redundant regulation, or a regulation that has no meaning to a particular fish,” Smith said. “Sometimes the state wants disease testing for certain species, and that disease has never even shown up in that particular species.”

Each state can make up its rules for importing and exporting fish, but if Ohio fish farmers want to ship across state lines, they have to know not only Ohio’s regulations but also the other states’.

“Permits may be inexpensive or free, but it’s the fact that farmer has to pay themselves or someone else to find out about each and every regulation (and) make the phone calls,” Smith explained.

“It is all of these indirect costs that hurt farmer’s profit.”

He applauds the work of the SAA. “Most of our fish meal or fish oil in our diets is coming from the ocean, and the oceans are not an unlimited source, as a lot of people once thought. Having good protein sources like soybeans not only makes fish farming cheaper, but it supports our U.S. fish farmers and our row crop farmers to shift away from fish meal and towards soybean meal.”

To learn more about aquaculture, visit the SAA online at www.soyaquaalliance.com