Learn Fish Farming
Announcement posted by ACS Distance Education 02 Dec 2013
With recent concerns looming around food availability and consumers demanding more information about where and how their food is sourced, fish farming is becoming a viable and attractive industry. Whether for personal interest or as a commercial venture, fish farming, also known as Aquaculture, can be a rewarding and fascinating industry to enter.
Completing an Aquaculture course with ACS can prepare you for work on a growing number of fish farms, industry suppliers or to run your own Aquaculture business.
Aquaculture can be defined as the culture of aquatic organisms for commercial purposes under controlled or partly controlled conditions. It includes both salt and freshwater species. “Mariculture” refers to a sub-category of Aquaculture that deals specifically with Marine Aquaculture.
According to the FOA of UN (http://www.fao.org), “Aquaculture, probably the fastest growing food-producing sector, now accounts for almost 50 percent of the world’s food fish and is perceived as having the greatest potential to meet the growing demand for aquatic food.”. Another interesting statistic from the FOAis that fish provides 17% of the world’s protein that is consumed.
The vast majority of the world’s small-scale aquaculture farms are also agriculture farms. This is especially true for developing countries, where fish culture is done to produce protein foods to feed the farmer and its family, or small country communities. This is not surprising because aquaculture requires land and water and farmers world-wide control most of the area suitable for aquaculture.
The reason for this strong development in aquaculture has been the over-exploiting of fisheries around the world resulting in lower numbers of catches in most of the classic fisheries (fishing grounds), coinciding with an increased demand for protein foods from fish and other water animals (crustaceans).
Starting out in Aquaculture can be daunting, getting the right information about what equipment is needed and how to care for your fish can be confusing. ACS Distance Education can help with our online course in Aquaculture.