In Chile, farmers spend 60 percent of their money on fish food because labor is so cheap. The high cost of food has driven fish farmers to find more efficient ways to feed fish, including using underwater cameras to avoid overfeeding. Breeding programs also favor salmon that grow faster with less food. The goal is always to reduce the amount of food needed to grow a pound of fish. In Chile, the average ratio is now 1.45 pounds of food for every pound of fish, less than what a chicken eats to gain a pound of edible meat.
Some Norwegian farms can get a pound of fish per pound of feed.
The salmon farming industry is also trying to reduce the cost of the feed itself, which is made of fish meal, fish oil and some vegetable materials. About 20 percent of the feed cost is pigment. The coloring is fed to farmed fish so their meat develops the same pink tone wild salmon get by feeding on crustaceans, said Eugenio Larrain of Fundacion Chile, which oversees fish farms in the South American nation. Chilean biologists are breeding fish that will develop the color with less pigment and B.C. researchers found a more effective pigment created naturally by red yeast. Preventing and treating disease is also costly.