Grant: College and Community Innovation Program

The growing aquaculture industry has become a global economic driver and an important source of food. Every province in Canada has an aquaculture industry with its own specialty; in Ontario, seven species are farmed, resulting in over 8,000 tonnes of food produced each year. Fleming College's Frost Campus in Lindsay, Ontario is home to two fish hatcheries and a small, steady aquaculture research program that is fully embedded into course curriculum. The proposed capacity-building research will allow Fleming to better serve the applied research needs of the local industry and move to providing research support to the national industry, which includes different farmed species and environments. The applied research will begin with existing partners with short-term goals of improving feed conversion ratios (FCR), developing feed strategies, and optimizing the use of functional feed additives for improved performance indicators. As the research program expands and matures, projects related to other aspects of the aquaculture industry will be developed, including environmental conditions affecting the growth of farmed fish (considering the warming of Canada's waters due to climate change), breeding and selection in fish farming, sustainability, and technology development for hatchery operations.To better serve the aquaculture industry with applied research, new dedicated infrastructure and an expansion of research systems are needed at Fleming College. The joint NSERC-CFI proposal will fund essential equipment needed by Fleming's industry research partners to enable the completion of research projects exploring new techniques, technologies, and innovative approaches.