A farmer-first approach: transforming approaches to aquatic animal welfare
November, 2024
Aquatic animal welfare isn’t just an abstract concept or a regulatory hurdle, it’s a practical, everyday tool that can change farms for the better. By putting science into the hands of farmers and empowering them to make impactful changes, FAI’s COO MURILO QUINTILIANO explains how this is helping redefine approaches to welfare in the aquaculture sector.
Top-down approach to addressing animal welfare
At FAI, we know achieving high welfare standards for farmed aquatic species - like tilapia, carp and shrimp - requires more than top-down directives. It calls for an approach that starts from the ground up, rooted in the day-to-day activity of aquaculture farmers.
For a long time, the aquaculture sector has depended on a hierarchical structure for addressing welfare, with retailers and processors setting welfare standards for farmers. While well-intentioned and sometimes successful, this system often leaves farmers feeling burdened and disconnected from the benefits these changes bring. This approach can also fail to leverage farmers' unique insights into their own systems.
Farmers are the ones who interact with their fish daily, observing their behaviours, environments and responses to stressors. Ignoring this invaluable knowledge is a missed opportunity to create practical, lasting welfare improvements. So, we’re flipping the script by focusing directly on the people who can make the biggest difference when it comes to aquatic animal welfare: the farmers themselves.
A bottom-up revolution
Since 2018, we’ve worked to empower aquaculture farmers with tools and training that translate complex welfare science into actionable insights. Our bottom-up way of working starts with understanding the challenges farmers face and co-creating solutions to fit their realities. This isn’t about imposing rigid standards, it’s about collaboration. By engaging farmers in the development of welfare frameworks and assessment tools, we ensure these innovations are practical, effective and relevant to their day-to-day operations.
In collaboration with partners in Brazil, Thailand, Vietnam, Honduras, the USA, Egypt, and China, our welfare frameworks focus on four critical domains - nutrition, environment, health and behaviour - and are designed to be easy for farmers to use. Instead of overwhelming farmers with academic jargon or complex systems, we’ve created simple, assessment tools like the mobile Tilapia Welfare App.
This app, available in multiple languages, allows farmers to observe and log welfare indicators on their farms, receiving real-time feedback on areas for improvement. The app uses a simple three-point scoring system that aligns with best scientific practices but is intuitive for farmers to implement and makes it easy for them to identify welfare risks and prioritise solutions.
FAI’s bottom-up approach to addressing animal welfare
Assessments are designed to be a guide that helps farmers see welfare as a way to solve existing production challenges and improve their bottom line. By empowering farmers to take ownership of welfare assessments, we change the emphasis. Welfare is no longer a compliance exercise; it becomes a practical tool for solving real-world problems, such as reducing mortality rates, improving growth rates, and optimising feed use.
An additional benefit highlighted by users is the ability to compare and discuss results across production sites and companies using a standardised ‘language’ provided by the assessment process and scoring reports. One manager, working for a company that produces and processes 8,0000 metric tonnes of tilapia per year and was among the early adopters of the app, explained: “I can now quantify it when a team member says that a specific batch of animals looks healthy.”
Scaling the approach
As with tilapia, our shrimp welfare framework has been co-developed with farmers, ensuring the tools we create address their specific challenges. Our shrimp welfare assessments integration into HydroNeo’s farm management app enables farmers to assess and improve the welfare of their shrimp in ways that also enhance production outcomes, creating a win-win scenario.
This approach is already showing results. In Southeast Asia, shrimp farmers who’ve learned to adapt feeding times to complement shrimp behaviour, for instance, have reported lower mortality rates and better growth. These simple, behaviour-driven changes illustrate the power of understanding and working with the natural needs of aquatic species.
And taking a bottom-up approach to welfare not only benefits farmers but also transforms the entire aquaculture supply chain.
By equipping farmers with the tools and knowledge to improve welfare, we’re creating a ripple effect that reaches processors, retailers and consumers. By providing species-specific welfare indicators and partnering with retailers, FAI is driving change from both ends of the value chain.
By adopting an outcome measure approach, retailers such as M&S can collaborate with suppliers to identify risk areas and implement improvement initiatives, where required. Recently M&S won a Special Recognition Award (Innovation Award Category) from Compassion in World Farming, thanks to our collaborative work developing a pioneering protocol to enhance shrimp welfare. It eliminates eye-stalk ablation, introduces electric stunning and supports farmers with extensive welfare training, and we expect this new initiative to benefit 300 million shrimp annually.
FAI’s farmer-centric model represents a fundamental shift in how the aquaculture sector approaches welfare. By focusing on empowering farmers rather than imposing standards, we’re fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation and continuous improvement. Farmers are not just the recipients of welfare initiatives; they are the drivers. And when farmers succeed, the entire aquaculture industry moves closer to a future where high welfare standards are the norm, not the exception.