Any listed Land Based Aquaculture companies in Brazil....???
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EW Group pumps 83 years of chicken genetics experience into tilapia
By Matt Craze Oct. 24, 2019 08:49 BST
Aquabel fingerlings farm in Mato Grosso do Sul state in western Brazil. Aquabel supplies GeneSeas and other major tilapia farmers from the site.
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ROLANDIA, Brazil -- Tilapia in a pond snap voraciously when tossed a handful of feed. It’s 17 degrees Celsius (62.6 degrees Fahrenheit) on a cold June morning in Rolandia, a town 574 kilometers away from Sao Paulo in a lush expanse known for its coffee and corn farms.
Tropical tilapia are known to lose their appetite when the weather drops below 22 degrees Celsius. But the hunger that this Rolandia fish show indicates the level of progress made by selective breeding techniques introduced by EW Group, one of the world’s largest players in poultry genetics.
Widening the feeding of tilapia could make a huge impact for the industry globally. It could allow farmers in semi-tropical areas, such as the state of Parana where Rolandia is located, to allow two growing seasons instead of one. And the same principle applies to other countries.
EW Group’s genetic program in Brazil shows how advancements could result in massive increases in aquaculture output without using more land. The German company is pouring almost a century of financial and human resources into a fish that it thinks could become as ubiquitous as chicken.
“This will be the most important breeding program in the world because it targets an aquatic species that probably will become the most sustainable animal protein source to feed a growing global population,” said Odd Magne Rodseth, EW Group’s group director of aquaculture. “This breeding program will change the story for tilapia.”
Aquaculture experts have long predicted that tilapia could become the ‘aquatic chicken’ of the 21st century, to coin a phrase from the University of Arizona professor Kevin Fitzsimmons. Despite a drop in US demand, the industry is taking off in other parts of the world. Egypt, for example, has become the world’s second-largest tilapia farmer and sells most of the fish within its domestic market.
Brazil currently produces about 400,000 metric tons of tilapia a year, far behind China with 1.8m metric tons, Egypt with 902,000t and Indonesia with 830,000t, according to figures by the Global Aquaculture Alliance. Blessed with the world’s largest freshwater resources and established infrastructure to distribute grains and animal protein to all parts of the world, Brazil could easily double what it produces today, Rodseth said.
Not only that, Brazil could compete on equal footing with China in the massive US frozen tilapia market, given that many processing lines will become automated next year, said Francisco Medeiros, the head of Brazil's fishing association PeixeBR. Netherlands-based aquaculture investment fund AquaSpark bought a stake in tilapia farmer Fisher Piscicultura on Oct. 2.
Brazil strategy started in 2016EW Group, which started poultry breeding in 1936, bought a majority share of Piscicultura Aquabel in 2016 as its second strategic move into aquaculture. The German company in 2007 bought AquaGen, the leading company in salmon genetics. Its involvement in the salmon industry has led to important breakthroughs such as eliminating infectious pancreatic necrosis (IPN) through selective breeding.
In more recent times, AquaGen has identified several novel genes in salmonids that have a big impact on animal welfare, health and meat quality. This know-how has been applied in the breeding programs and is a game-changer for the salmon industry, Rodseth said. Besides disease resistance genes, new breeding technologies can, in a much more precise and cost-effective way, select salmon with gene variants that ensure the required red filet color, he said.
The German group retained the co-founder partnership of Ricardo Neukirchner and Claudio Batirola in Aquabel, who built up a significant distribution of tilapia fingerling farms across areas in southern and central Brazil. The group has started to build a state-of-the-art hatchery in the remote northern state of Tocantins, where hot year-round temperatures will allow a year-round supply of fingerlings to major customers.
The tilapia industry in Brazil is consolidating among a handful of major actors with industrial expertise, especially from large integrators in the poultry sector. Key requirements in the development of a competitive tilapia industry are a year-round supply of fingerlings based on the professional research-based breeding program, Rodseth said. This was the main driver for EW Group to enter Brazil, he said.
EW Group doubled down its tilapia strategy by buying Genomar, a Luzon, Philippines-based company that specializes in tilapia genetics. The company will channel a global strategy to become dominant in tilapia genetics through Aquabel and Genomar, and by channelling knowledge from its other business units. Through Aquabel and Genomar, EW Group plans to expand into other areas of Latin America.
Unlike the thousands of small farmers in Asia, Brazil offers multi-million dollar, well-financed groups like C. Vale and Copacol that own feed mills, cold storage facilities and are already accustomed to the rituals of exporting fresh meat to other parts of the world. Major service companies like Merck & Co. are already in Brazil with an array of vaccines and pharmaceutical products for poultry and swine and are keen to diversify into aquaculture.
Customers like GeneSeas, a company backed by private equity fund Aqua Capital, need a hatchery that is certified with Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) to sell fish with BAP’s 4-star certification, said Aquabel’s Neukirchner. That allows Brazil to sell fish at a premium to Chinese products in North America.
EW Group already owns a Brazilian office, allowing the tilapia team to sidestep many of the cumbersome bureaucratic procedures of starting up business activities in the South American country. That allowed EW Group to get right down to the task of reducing the grow-out time of tilapia fish from 90 days, to significantly less.
Aiming at tilapia geneticsPart of the attractiveness of the tilapia market is the short growth period. Combined with genomics, or the study of the genome to identify genetic traits, EW Group feels like it can be a rapid impact on the tilapia industry.
“This is why tilapia can become enormous, you can get that quality of relevant breeding information back very quickly,” Rodseth said. “It’s very like poultry in that sense.”
Genetic companies thrive off a close relationship with customers and rely on data that comes back from growers, Rodseth said. One of the problems with the salmon industry is that efficiencies are harder to enact because of the much longer three-year growth cycle, and the transition from freshwater to saltwater in anadromous species.
“In salmon, it’s more difficult to achieve reliable production data with a lot of noise under large-scale industrial conditions,” Rodseth said. “In tilapia, we have much more control, due to the fact that tilapia has a short production period in the same freshwater environment. They buy the same size fingerlings, they know when they get to the right weight, and they can make decisions about genetics.”
EW Group will consolidate this strategy by working on tilapia vaccines through its unit Vaxxinova to tackle species-specific problems such as streptococcus.
The company tends a big economic impact in every species it gets involved in and tilapia will be no exception, Rodseth said. Some competitors have appeared on the horizon. EW Group has a focused business model and breeding programs and provides technology at a pace that no-one can match, he said.
Contact the author matt@sphericresearch.com |
