Fish meal

Coming up, the dirty business of farmed fish.

Oceans are being depleted for fish meal, and the fish themselves are often kept in unsanitary conditions.

When they're overcrowding, they're fighting each other and biting each other and attacking each other, so you're trying to calm them down.

And so you're putting all this stuff in these ponds that are, from a food safety perspective, really worrisome.

Then it goes to the plants and explores the conditions at these plants, and then the fish farms themselves before – The fish like salmon and shrimp make it to retailers, and then we buy it and eat it.

Begin with the ships.

These ships that collect all the small fish that then get turned into fish meal.

Describe the conditions there.

On the other end, you have the feed bill, which is 50 to 60% of a farmer's cost.

And that bill is written in two commodities that only know hits directly, soybean meal from South America and fish meal from Peru.

So when the equatorial Pacific warms, You don't get one shock.

You get a cascade.

And there's the logistics side, roads, access to farms, moving feed.

getting shrimp to processing plants and eventually to port.

Also, Perus and Chauvi fishery is a key source of fish meal and fish oil used in aquaculture feeds.

And El Niño can affect that supply as well.