Leo Ray surveys his new fish-food mill.
He built it this past summer, and though he hasn’t tried it yet, he has high hopes. Ring Die Granulator
“We figure the mill will just about cut our costs of feed in half,” said the owner of Fish Breeders of Idaho.
He needs that cost reduction. After the main ingredient for fish food went up 1,000 percent, the food itself got more expensive.
“The price went from about $200 a ton to up to… $2,000 a ton,” he said.
That price increase knocked out any profits for the industry and trickled down to the consumer.
“As the price of fish meal has gone up, the price of fish had to go up with that,” he said.
Ray is out to fix the problem, or rather fix the profits he’s lost with rising costs. In order to do that, he’s localizing his fish food, which is made mostly of fishmeal and plant products, like grain or soy.
The plants are easily sourced from local farms. Products that aren’t grown in Idaho can still be found close by. Ray says this will help with shipping costs.
The other main part, fishmeal, comes from right next door at his processing plant.
“If you raise a fish, process it and eat it, you only eat about 50 percent of that fish,” Ray said.
The leftovers, he said, can be repurposed into fishmeal by running them through an extruder, a device that’s used frequently in food processing to make products like Cheerios or pet food, but is new to this sector.
“No one else in the fish industry is doing what we're wanting to do,” he said.
By mixing the fishmeal with a plant mixture perfected by the University of Idaho, he not only saves money, but improves the diet of his fish.
He likened this to an old Dear-Abby adage where a reader asked if one could simultaneously be healthy and a vegetarian. She said yes, if you are a very good nutritionist.
“Or,” Ray finished, “you can be a vegetarian and be very healthy and cheat just a little bit and eat a piece of meat the size of a quarter every day.”
Feed Pellet Mill And that quarter, he said, is the fishmeal.