The Singapore Food Agency’s Marine Aquaculture Centre (MAC) has been spearheading the development of aquaculture technologies in Singapore to increase local fish production in a productive, sustainable, and resilient manner. The MAC team recognised that to support the sustainable increase in aquaculture production, fish feeds would need to be optimised for locally farmed species to promote healthy growth, be formulated with ingredients from sustainable sources and to improve feed conversion ratios. There were, however, no proper aquaculture nutrition facility in Singapore. Hence, the aquaculture nutrition facility, consisting of a pilot feed mill and experimental tank systems, was established at MAC.
A proper feed mill is complex as it consists of multiple processes and requires many specialised equipment for raw material handling, quality control, extrusion process, drying process and coating application. The pilot-scale feed mill at MAC was planned to replicate the feed extrusion process of a commercial feed mill and with the flexibility to produce small batches of different feed formulation in quick succession. Currently, the pilot aquaculture feed mill is equipped with state-of-the-art equipment for milling, sifting, mixing, extrusion and drying. An inventory of common raw ingredients such as fish meal, macro-nutrients and micro-nutrients are also available. The central piece of equipment is the Clextral EV25 twin-screw extruder which is designed for feed product testing and reliable scale-up production. It can produce floating and sinking feed via various processing parameters. A vacuum coater is available for inclusion of heat sensitive feed additives or attractants.
A great part of aqua nutrition research includes feeding trials to test for digestibility, FCR or other effects. Therefore, the aquaculture nutrition facility also consists of experimental tank systems ranging from 200L tanks to 1000L tanks. Each system encompasses 20 to 36 tanks. All systems are equipped with the recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) and faecal collection units for digestibility studies, ensuring accurate feeding trial results. The range of tank size and number tanks will allow aqua nutrition experiments of various scope.