Hervé Lucien-Brun
Aquaculture Consultant
Jefo Nutrition, Inc.
Canada
Hervé is an independent consultant based in France. He has more than 40 years of experience in tropical marine shrimp and finfish aquaculture in major producing countries including Latin America, North Africa, Europe, and Asia; as well as New Caledonia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Tanzania and Saudi Arabia.
He is involved in the quality control and marketing of shrimp, pangasius and seafood processing, auditing of facilities and procedures. In tropical aquaculture, he is involved in design studies, implementation and farm management, and technical management of projects and transfer of technology. Hervé has a Master’s degree in Animal Physiology from the University of Paris, XI, Orsay, France.
Cost Efficiency with Digestible Nutrient-based Formulations
Abstract
Today, precision nutrition is essential for improving the efficiency, sustainability, and profitability of modern aquaculture systems. Feed accounts for 50-70% of total production costs. As a result, nutritional management is one of the strongest levers farmers can use to improve competitiveness. Inadequate feed formulation or poor feeding practices inevitably result in nutrient losses, impaired growth performance, inefficient feed conversion, and increased environmental pollution. These failures drive up production costs and degrade the rearing environment, potentially causing direct mortalities — through the accumulation of toxic concentrations of metabolites— or indirect mortalities by promoting the development of disease outbreaks.
Precision nutrition is based on formulating diets according to the actual nutritional requirements of aquatic animals and the effective digestibility of nutrients — amino acid balance, ingredient quality, processing methods, species, age and physiological stage — rather than relying solely on total nutrient content such as crude protein or fat. Highly digestible diets improve nutrient absorption and utilization in fish and shrimp, resulting in better growth, improved health status, and a significant reduction in nutrient discharge into the aquatic environment.
This approach requires accurate digestibility values for each ingredient and each nutrient, as well as a thorough understanding of how nutritional requirements and pellet characteristics evolve across growth stages. Larval and juvenile phases deserve particular attention: an immature digestive system demands the use of highly digestible proteins, appropriately sized micro pellets, and water-stable feeds — all essential conditions for the survival and optimal development of young animals.
Effective precision nutrition strategies draw on several complementary controls: rigorous ingredient selection based on digestibility coefficients, advanced feed processing technologies, enzyme supplementation, and the reduction of antinutritional factors that limit nutrient availability. The central performance indicator is feed cost per kilogram of weight gain — not the price per kilogram of feed — an accurate reflection of the true economic impact of formulation decisions. It is time to reassess formulations that have become unnecessarily costly, and to make feed a genuine driver of production cost reduction in support of the long-term sustainability of the industry.
This presentation illustrates concretely, through results obtained in rainbow trout, pangasius, and shrimp, how improvements in feed digestibility and pellet quality translate directly into better zootechnical performance, a lower feed conversion ratio, and reduced production costs per kilogram of biomass produced. Precision nutrition thus offers farmers measurable economic benefits while contributing to a more environmentally responsible aquaculture.
© TARS 2026 – The Aquaculture Roundtable Series®