Currently the global aquaculture industry is challenged with increasing and highly volatile ingredient costs on one hand and decreasing farmgate price for the produce on the other. In this scenario, aquafarmers are forced to procure and use less expensive feed variants or increase the production per unit area to still remain profitable. Doing so would mean that FCR’s are going to go up which would lead to more waste being accumulated in the farming system and being released into the environment which is undesired. Feedmillers on the other hand are exploring alternate ingredient sources and better extrusion technologies for feed manufacturing to reduce feed cost and to remain profitable and sustainable.
Over the last several decades, the aquaculture industry has utilized the benefits of using extrusion technology over traditional pelleting such as improved starch gelatinization, increased pellet durability, water stability and achieving floatation control by manipulating the pellet density. Having said that, most of the capacity building has been on the installation and utilization of traditional single & twin screw extrusion process. These traditional extrusion systems used in the aquafeed industry were drawn from other industries and were designed down to be just good enough for aqua feed production. The Wenger AquaFlex Extrusion system has been developed with the needs of the aquatic species in mind.
The AquaFlex system utilizes specialized screw element design to deliver higher volumetric capacity. The same screw configuration is used to produce both floating as well as sinking feeds, thereby increases uptime and optimizes production. Lower mechanical energy as well as die pressure results in smaller and finer cell structures inside the pellet resulting in more uniform pellet densities and more nutrient per pellet (20- 25%). Wenger in-house research has shown that the extruded pellets produced on the AquaFlex has the least turbidity thereby reduced nutrient leaching and water pollution making it most suitable for high density aquaculture practices.