Essentially, to produce high-quality fish feed, you must have background knowledge of the specific fish to be fed. Nutritional needs vary between each species depending on feeding temperature, water salinity and age.

Therefore, it is important to understand the nutritional needs of the target species before preparing feed. The essential nutrients needed for fish are protein, lipids, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals. In order for your fish to reach optimal size in the shortest possible time, the feed must contain enough nutrients to provide energy and promote growth.

In general, proteins are important for tissue regeneration, and lipids and carbohydrates are the sources of energy and feed stability (combination) purposes, respectively. Inadequate deficiencies in any of these nutrients, especially protein, reduce fish growth.

Therefore, the required protein is the minimum amount of protein required for optimal growth at a certain age. For example, for fish fry/salmon, dietary protein levels are typically about 45-50%, compared with 42-45% for underage or adult adults. Adults fish species need about 30-32% to grow, adult fish only need 28-30% to be satisfied.

These suggest that smaller sizes and cold-water fish have higher protein requirements than adult and warm-water fish. In addition to nutritional needs, feeding habits are another important aspect to consider. Similar to humans having a wide variety of high-quality foods, fish also have their own preferences for feed. They may be carnivorous, omnivorous or herbivorous. These will require the formulation of different types of ingredients.

Understanding a species requires you to observe feeding behavior. Fish can be divided into three feeding behavior areas; Surface and mid-level water feeds will require floating particulate feed, while bottom feeders will require sinking particles.

There’s a lot of factors need to be taken into consideration when creating quality fish feed. As a fish nutritionist, theoretically, I would say, it will not be justified by just writing this post, I could answer this question. Years of research and development are essential to establish high quality feed. Hence, I would suggest to start by learning about your fish of interest.

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