Pea marketers have to use their heads to figure out how to sell more product to creatures with tails.
That was the message two University of Saskatchewan feed researchers delivered at the Processing for Profit conference held in Saskatoon Dec. 3.
They said there is a vast and largely untapped potential for peas in hog diets and in the booming aquaculture industry.
Murray Drew, associate professor of animal and poultry science at the U of S, encouraged processors to consider manufacturing a pea protein concentrate suitable for farmed fish.
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“The aquaculture industry is going to pass the beef industry sometime between 2010 and 2015 in terms of the amount of protein that it actually produces,” he said.
By the time it takes to leapfrog from fourth to third spot in the global protein ranks, the fish industry will require three times as much feed as it consumes now.
A typical salmon grower diet is 50 percent fish meal and 15 percent fish oil, but the supply of these ocean ingredients is inconsistent. By 2009, aquaculture will use all the available supplies of fish oil.
The annual supply of fish meal and oil is around 6.5 million and 1.1 million tonnes respectively. During the last El Nino those levels dropped by about one-third each, causing huge fluctuations in input costs.
Fish farmers turned to alternative protein sources such as soybean and corn gluten meal, but those two products hurt fish growth when used at high concentrations.
Producers need a broader spectrum of plant-based protein substitutes to mix in with their soybean, corn and fish meal ingredients.
Researchers at the university’s aquaculture facility have developed a couple of flax-based fish meal alternatives that could fit the bill.
Flax is a rich source of omega-3 fatty acids, but it has some “really weird antinutritional factors” so it has to be dehulled and extruded with either a pea or canola protein concentrate to increase the product’s digestibility and efficiency.
The outcome is a nutrient-dense substitute that can replace as much as 40 percent of the fish meal in current rations without ill effects. The flax and pea combination is particularly attractive for fish farmers exporting product to GM-sensitive regions like Japan and the European Union.
“We’ve got an enormous opportunity because peas and flax are not genetically modified,” said Drew.
Another opportunity for peas is in hog diets. This has long been talked about but hasn’t materialized the way many thought it would.
Prairie Swine Centre researcher Ruurd Zijlstra said with a slight change in buyer attitudes and processor techniques, every pea produced in Canada could be consumed by Western Canada’s 12 million hogs.
Those pigs eat their way through 8.4 million tonnes of feed every year. Zijlstra said two to three million tonnes of that should be peas.
Farmers harvested 2.1 million tonnes of peas this fall, but only a few hundred thousand tonnes of that will likely find its way into domestic swine rations.
One reason hog producers do not use peas to their potential has to do with the way they measure the energy content of competing ingredients.
“Digestible energy is still the quality parameter that people would use in most of North America to describe the energy content of ingredients, whereas part of Europe has already switched to net energy,” said Zijlstra.
The latter measure incorporates how much energy is wasted by hogs digesting ingredients high in protein and fibre.
Under the digestible energy measure, soybean and canola meal outperform peas. But it is the other way around when the net energy measure is employed, which could be a boon for the pulse crop, said Zijlstra.
Another good sales prospect for peas exists in starter diets. Up to one-quarter of those rations could be made up of the pulse, but they are not given to young pigs between five and 20 kilograms because of digestibility problems.
That could be resolved by further processing, said Zijlstra.
