LABOTA: The future of Fish Farming
The future of farming is fish. The future of fish farming is LABOTA.
The once abundant oceans on our planet are rapidly being depleted thanks to over fishing. The food chain is being disrupted, and the environment threatened. Hunting on the high seas is wiping out our food supply.
As a result, the price of fish is rising as more nations compete for this staple of a healthy diet. Over the next three decades, 37 million extra tons of fish must be found just to feed the current population.
Yet conventional fish farming, also known as aquaculture, often worsens the situation. Stored in large pens on open oceans, farm-bred salmon and other species can spread diseases into the open seas. And operations like these often consume more fish than they produce, further reducing the numbers of wild fish.
What is the solution?
LABOTA ? Land-Based Organic Tuna Aquaculture.
Our patented, hi-tech process doesn't threaten wildlife, and produces organically grown fish in specialized tanks that are pure and untainted by disease or chemicals. We recycle our waste, resulting in efficiencies that reduce our costs.
Our specialty is the Bluefin Tuna, the source of sashimi, one of the world's great delicacies. For years, fish farmer have grappled with Bluefin. Producing it on a large scale is called the gHoly Grailh of fish farming. At LABOTA, we believe that grail is within sight.
The ocean is the last frontier of farming on earth. Most of the fish consumed are still hunted, but that is rapidly changing. Farming fish is one of the fasted growing industries in the world, but one that stirs controversy because of environmentally damaging methods.
If it is to succeed like cattle or sheep farming, aquaculture will have to develop the methods to produce more fish at a cheaper cost and with less waste.
And LABOTA already hasc
The Challenge: Farming that Saves Our Seas
In the 1950s and 60s, radical breakthroughs in soil agriculture resulted in techniques that vastly increased the yields of rice, corn, wheat and other commodities that helped feed a rapidly growing world. The dire predictions of worldwide famine never materialized because of these breakthroughs.
Aquaculture, the farming of fish, at that point today. Technologies developed by LABOTA and other companies are on the brink of a revolution in the farming of fish, a staple of the world's diet. What we hope to do quite simply is farm the world's fish on land, and save the oceans by letting its wild fish replenish.
The aquaculture industry has become a major supplier of fish and shellfish in markets worldwide. The industry has been growing at an average annual rate at 8 percent, compared to 2 percent for soil agriculture. Since 1992, the global production of farm finfish and shellfish almost tripled in weight and nearly doubled in value
Currently, there are two types of fish farming. The most dominant technique is open-water fish farming using submersible cages or industrial-strength nets in bodies to raise fish for commercial sale.
But open-ocean farms have come under much criticism by environmental groups because of concerns about concentrating fish in one spot of open waters. There have been problems with disease, pollution and the use of chemicals in fish feed to treat the diseases. Another concern is a harmful up-the-food-chain effect that using such fish feed might have on the marine ecosystem.
Wild fish is often used as feed for farmed fish, which contributes to the depletion of wild fish populations. Cramped pens necessitate the use of antibiotics. Red dye is fed to the fish to give the meat an appealing color. All of these are reasons that open-water salmon farming, for instance, has been considered unsustainable by many environmentalists.
But with closed, land-based system, many of these concerns disappear. Closed systems that treat and recirculate wastewater cost more to set up, but many experts contend they're more economical because less food is wasted, fish burn less energy and grow faster, and there is little chance of disease transfer.
The most difficult to raise on closed farms are meat eaters like salmon, which require protein to grow and produce the most waste. At the cutting edge are closed systems like LABOTA's that are pioneering technologies to farm bluefin tuna and other species.
The closed fish farming market in the United States is still in its infancy, especially when it comes to salt-water marine life. The U.S. $1 billion commercial aquaculture industry is currently dominated by freshwater aquaculture production of species, which far outpaces marine aquaculture.
The Fish Gap
Roughly 45 percent of all consumed by humans ? about 48 million tons ? are raised on fish farms around the world. But farms are growing rapidly, and over the next ten years they will produce as many fish as are caught wild at sea today.
But the production on farms thus far cannot keep up with the soaring demand as more and more people switch to heart-healthy fish diets, and more of the world's population in countries like India and China demand more protein for their diets.
This is called the gfish gap.h The levels of wild-fish catches haven't grown since the mid-1980s, and the best fishing beds are depleted. Simply put, there's no more wild fish to be caught.
But by 2030, at least ? at least ? 85 million extra tons of fish will be needed just to maintain today's current levels of fish consumption per person. That's just from the fact that 2 billion more people will be demanding fish.
To put it another way, the average person is consuming more fish every year, and more people are developing the wealth and taste to consume quality fish every year. If that demand isn't met, global famine is a real risk. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported in 2007 that increased fish farming will reduce hunger and malnutrition in the world's poor countries by providing food rich in protein, fatty acids, vitamins and minerals,
The fish gap can only be closed by fish farming.
But what kind of fish can be produced by fish farming? To date, most of the world's fish farmed on ranches have been salmon. Eighty percent of the fresh and frozen salmon consumed in the U.S. comes from net pen farms in coastal waterways around the world, with Chile the single largest supplier. The U.S. imported 457 million pounds of fresh and frozen salmon in 2007, or $1.4 billion worth, according to the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service.
But most of these farms are highly polluting floating fish pens on the open seas. And the fish they farm are carnivorous?they consume other fish at a rate that further depletes the seas.
The answer is a technique like LABOTA's that reduces the fish consumed to harvest fish, and can be used to grow herbivacious fish?that live off of plants, not other fish.
The Lexus of Fish Farming
The Bluefin Tuna might be called the Lexus of the world's fish. A single bluefin actually costs as much as a Lexis?in January 2008, a 608 lb. bluefin sold for 55,000 in Tokyo.
What makes this tuna so special? Its belly meat provides the sweetest sashimi of all, and sashimi sales are growing as Japanese cuisine becomes the staple of urban centers from New York to Shanghai.
Successfully breeding the bluefin in captivity has been called the gholy grailh of fish farming. But even more important, satisfying its appetite in a cheap and environmentally sustainable way will revolutionize the world's aquaculture.
That's where LABOTA comes in. It's organically raised bluefin have the potential to overcome one of the largest hurdles to bluefin farming?the 55 pounds of feed fish (sardines and pilchard) it takes to produce 2 pounds of tuna. Those two pounds sell for $200.
The race to farm the bluefin, however, has also led to excesses. Bluefin ranches have devastated stocks in the Pacific and the Mediterranean. These huge floating farms have also raised questions about the spread of disease to wild fish.
"Bluefin tuna" includes three species. Southern bluefin, according to the Australian government, is being harvested at a rate 30 percent greater than the total allowable catch set by international treaties. The growing scarcity of southern bluefin is a significant factor contributing to its role as the preferred species for the Japanese sashimi market, which in turn aggravates the problem of its scarcity.
Atlantic bluefin, found in the Mediterranean and in the cold waters of the North Atlantic, is the target of intensive and lucrative fisheries from both sides of the Atlantic. This pressure currently fuels the explosive growth of ranching in the Mediterranean. The Pacific bluefin is thought also to be in steep decline, but unlike its southern and Atlantic counterparts, this species does not benefit from oversight by an international regulatory body. Its population status is therefore largely unknown.
Successfully farming bluefin in the future will be a question of both economic and environmental sustainability. As more farm-fed bluefin comes to market, demand will inevitably come down if the supply overwhelms it. That makes it essential to develop effective techniques like LABOTA to reduce the cost of farming each bluefin even as demand grows worldwide. In Japan, recent average prices have fallen as much as 60 percent, while on-ranch costs of production have risen 30 percent. Tuna ranching is viable only as long as the premium price of its product is protected, which in turn demands scarcity of supply
The advent of LABOTA technology arrives at an important time. Currently, Japan consumes 60 percent of the world's tuna. But as the populations of China, India and Russia grow in wealth and sophistication, the demands for a tasty, healthy cuisine will expand exponentially.
Other fish farming methods are not nearly as clean and sustainable as the techniques behind LABOTA. They harm the oceans, produce a poor quality of fish, and result in waste that isn't recycled. For nations, which is trying to develop an industry producing the best quality fish, in the most responsible manner, LABOTA is the answer
