Economics of Trout Aquaculture - A New Benchmarking Approach

Suggested Bibliographic Reference: Challenging New Frontiers in the Global Seafood Sector: Proceedings of the Eighteenth Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade, July 11-15, 2016. Compiled by Stefani J. Evers and Ann L. Shriver. International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade (IIFET), Corvallis, 2016.Proceedings of the Eighteenth Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade, held July 11-15, 2016 at Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Center (AECC), Aberdeen, Scotland, UK.The availability of economic performance data at farm level is a necessary precondition for basic economic analysis of aquaculture production systems. However reliable and comparable data are often missing. Due to different production systems with varying economic performances, a quantitative data collection is quite complex and expensive. The Thünen Institute has established a more qualitative approach for the comparative assessment of economic performance of different agricultural production sector and built up a global network supporting it with the needed continuous data: the typical farm approach and agri benchmark network. The integration of aquaculture in this network has started two years ago by undertaking a pilot study on trout farming. Based on focus groups and fish farmer interviews we have defined virtual farm datasets, which are empirically grounded in Denmark, Turkey and Germany. These nations are directly linked via trade flows of portion-sized trout. One advantage of the qualitative sampling procedure is the reduction of costs for the collecting data, while it enables in-depth data analyses of farm economics simultaneously. Our results infer that Turkish farmers, which usually run raceways systems, have cost advantages due to low wages and directly benefit from an advantageous climate. Via automatization modern Danish and German trout farms are able to reduce their labour costs and improve competitiveness. In contrast, smaller and more traditional working farms seem to struggle when it comes to long-term profitability. Finally, our presentation will discuss the potentials and limits of ‘the typical farm approach’ for future data collection