RELU
‘Warmwater Fish Production as a Niche Production and Market Diversification Strategy for Organic Arable Farmers with Implications for Sustainability and Public Health’
As the title proved quite a mouthful we decided to refer to this simply as the RELU project – referring to its funding by Research Councils UK under their Rural Economy Land Use (RELU) programme. The ‘Tilapia Scotland’ project arose from this formative work.
By the end of the RELU project, working with commercial partners from 2005 to 2008, we demonstrated production of the warm water species, tilapia as an economically feasible diversification strategy for UK farmers. In addition to technical production issues this highly multidisciplinary project included marketing, entrepreneurship and public health perspectives.
Market research was conducted through focus groups, channel interviews, product placements, demonstration meetings with prospective producers and adopters in various market segments. The project found that for smaller-scale farmers to be profitable, they should target premium niche-markets exploiting unique product selling points (USPs) of localness, freshness and greenness. The last trait is linked to the omnivorous dietary requirements of tilapia combined with environmentally-sound credentials of the recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) technology adopted. Counter-intuitively, economic analysis indicated that water heating was relatively low in the order of operating costs. This is because in well-insulated buildings ‘waste heat’ generated by the biological load and pumping processes is effectively recycled internally. To enhance profitability greatest emphasis should therefore be placed on minimising feeding and pumping costs, as well as appropriate production scheduling to optimise capital efficiency.
Links
Project Website – Further details and related RELU outputs
Downloads
Information pack (.doc) containing introductory information
on technical, marketing, cost-benefit and licensing issues.
