Salmon Feed Data

To find out how useful farmed salmon is for bringing nutrients like omega 3 oils, selenium and vitamin B12 to our diets, Feedback did a set of calculations using data on salmon feed ingredients and nutrition from the best publicly available sources we were able to find. For total volumes of marine ingredients in Scottish salmon feed, we found reliable data for 2014⁴⁵ which we considered sufficiently representative for our estimates, given that we expect forage fish dependency ratios (FFDR) in 2019 not to be significantly different due to high salmon mortalities. Feedback can recalculate these figures with more up-to-date volumes of fishmeal and fish oil when these are made available.

We created three scenarios:

• Scenario A – Business as usual: maintaining current levels of salmon production using both trimmings and wild-caught fish to produce fishmeal and fish oil for salmon feed. Our calculations considered that fishmeal leftover from salmon farming would be used for farmed prawn production.
• Scenario B: Trimmings only salmon farming producing about half of current volumes of salmon given that half of the fish oil used in European salmon feed comes from trimmings
• Scenario C: Trimmings only salmon farming, combined with mussel farming for human consumption