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Hey there,
We hope you’re doing well! You’re reading FWI’s quarterly newsletter, our more comprehensive and (hopefully) more skimmable summary of how we’ve been working to help fishes over the past three months.
Just one update for you here: We will soon recruit a new Operations Lead/Associate. The position will be tasked with leading FWI's financial, people, and legal operations, and is one of the more important roles we will hire for this year.
If you’re interested in working full-time in operations at FWI, or know someone who might be, please respond to this email. The job description will be live on our Careers page next week.
That’s all for now!
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Have a great week!
Haven King-Nobles
Executive Director
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By The Numbers
The following are some of the numbers we believe are representative of our work over the last quarter:
- Farms added to the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture (ARA): 0* (total: 77)
- Fishes lives improved in Q2: 54,000 (see our Highlight below for more information)
- Full-time staff added: 2
- Welfare Standard tests completed: 1 (specifically, this was a test assessing whether better feed management would improve farm oxygen levels)
- Percent of time ARA farms are in our required water quality range (per morning measurements): 85%
- Corporate procurement trial runs completed: 1
* We did not add any farms to the ARA last quarter primarily because we were focusing more on both operational improvements and researching welfare improvements with our Welfare Standard team. Now that we have resolved some (though not all) of these tasks, we are aiming to add 50 farms to the ARA in Q3 (we added 5 in July—so will need to pick up the pace!).
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Highlight
A Deep Dive into FWI’s Fishes Helped Calculation
As some of our eagle-eyed readers noticed in our April quarterly newsletter, we had previously estimated that we had helped zero fishes in Q1. When this trend proceeded to largely continue into April and May, we conducted an internal investigation to understand its causes. This highlight discusses the findings of that internal report*, as we think they’re indicative of some of the key features and limitations of our current model.
How could Fish Welfare Initiative go a quarter without helping fishes? To understand part of the answer here, it’s necessary to understand the process through which we currently add fishes helped to our Impact page (the following is based on water quality improvements—we also sometimes help fishes via density reductions):
- We perform monthly visits to each farm in the ARA, at which point we might find that the water quality is out of our required range.
- We provide the farmer a corrective action (CA), which is one or more implementable changes the farmer can make (e.g. aerating more, increasing water exchange) to improve the water quality.
- We follow up to ensure that the farmer has implemented the actions, and to check if the water quality has improved.
- Our ground team makes a judgment about whether the improvement meets our Fishes Helped Criteria, and this judgment is reviewed by our Director of International Programs (Jennifer).
The limitation of such a system is that it is reactive—we haven’t (yet) found many improvements we can make proactively that would allow us to help all the fishes in a farm. This means that, even though the combined number of fishes reached by our ARA program is in the millions, the number of individuals whose lives are actually improved is unfortunately a minority of those.
Also because this system is reactive, it’s possible for us to continue running our programming for a whole quarter and then, because of failures in the four-step process above or water quality being sufficiently good enough that it doesn’t need improving, for us to not help any fishes.
What were the causes behind FWI not helping any fishes in Q1?
We found the following to be the main issues:
- We inadvertently became more strict in counting fishes helped, due primarily to staffing changes.
- We found fewer instances of poor water quality (which, to be clear, is a good thing for the fishes in these systems).
- We missed several instances which, due to internal miscommunication, were not initially counted as fishes helped but we now believe should be. As it turned out then, after this review, our best estimates suggest that we improved the lives of about 150,000 fishes in Q1, although the number of instances of fishes helped in this quarter were still relatively fewer (just two instances, but both in relatively large farms).
You can see part of the numbers behind these conclusions in the (somewhat complex) chart below:
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A more expanded view of the steps we go through to help fishes (and specifically, to add them to our Fishes Helped count on our Impact Page). Note the relatively lower values for step 1, and the relatively steeper drop-offs between steps 5 and 6, for Q1 and Q2 of 2023. We believe these are the primary causes for FWI’s fewer fishes helped so far this year.
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What does this say about FWI’s programming?
There’s a few main lessons that we’re taking away:
- The importance of more objective systems of measurement, which would have prevented our counting system from changing merely because of a staffing change. We continue to think more about this, although given the total lack of research on the magnitude of any welfare improvements for any Indian major carp species, we will probably continue to need to rely heavily on judgment calls for the near future.
- The impact of environmental conditions like weather on fish welfare. So far, 2023 seems to be a better year than 2022 in Andhra Pradesh for weather conditions conducive to farmed fish welfare, which in turn means that there are fewer issues to solve.
- The need for welfare improvements that help fishes proactively, and don’t just wait for issues to appear. Our Welfare Standard Department will continue developing such improvements.
* Feel free to request access to the full internal report if you’re curious.
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The Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture is Growing Again
After a six-month break, our Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture is adding farms again. We stopped expanding after December 2022 to focus on improving internal operations and supporting the Welfare Standard Department. We plan to add 50 more fish farms in Q3 and another 100 in Q4.
Adding 150 farms in the following months will give us better insights to identify how best to add staff and farmers to the ARA. We are experimenting with various approaches, like partnering with local organizations to add farmers in large groups instead of individually. We expect that these optimizations will enhance our ability to scale.
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FWI staff Nikhil and Subrata observe farmers measure fish feed at an Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture farm in Eluru, Andhra Pradesh, India.
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Welfare Standard Department Updates
The purpose of this department is to continuously improve our welfare standards, which our farmers in the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture then implement. Here’s our biggest highlights from Q2:
Our experimental pond setup continues. We’re partnering with Adikavi Nannaya University in Andhra Pradesh, India, to set up fish ponds to run tests that will later inform our work with the fish farms. See the picture below for the newly-completed ponds (all fishes will be raised in these ponds with higher-welfare standards and later released into their species' natural habitats).
Some of the experimental and protocol setup has been challenging, but now we believe we’re nearly ready to begin this multi-month test. Our hope is that these ponds will serve as a research facility for higher-welfare practices—first for feed management, and later for other improvements we will test.
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The experimental ponds we are setting up at Adikavi Nannaya University in Andhra Pradesh, India.
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We’ve also been researching “focus farms” and different fish life stages. The idea of focus farms is that a minority of farms seem to account for the majority of the water quality issues, so we’re considering investing more heavily in partnering with those few farms while providing more basic monitoring and recommendations to the others.
The consideration of different life stages comes from the fact that fishes go through different farming systems associated with their different life stages. So, for instance, a Rohu fish in Andhra Pradesh will probably start life in a hatchery, be transported to a nursery pond, be moved yet again to a rearing pond, and then moved one final time to a growout pond.
Specifically here, we’re considering the idea that it could be more impactful to focus welfare improvements at an earlier life stage, as a) fishes are more crowded in the earlier life stages, and b) partially as a result, the mortality rate at these earlier stages is enormous (often reaching 50%).
We visited 20 rearing farms last quarter, and plan to publish our findings shortly.
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Farmer Engagement Department Updates
The purpose of this department is to recruit and retain farmers in the ARA. It is also tasked with meeting our goal of adding 50 new farms this quarter. Over the last quarter it worked primarily on the following.
- Farmer enrollment planning: We continued partnering with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to plan for recruiting new farmers in Q3 and Q4 of this year. PwC is currently working on a government-supported fish farming project, and has generously supported our planning in bringing higher welfare practices to the farmers they work with.
- Incentive exploration: We began supporting some of our farmers to access credit in the form of the Kisan Credit Card, which we believe will incentivize farmers further to participate in our programming.
- We are assessing the feasibility and value of farmer experience centers, extensions of our field offices where farmers could access water quality testing, and have their questions answered by our staff—a further incentive we’re considering for participation in our programming.
- Trial run: As mentioned in our last newsletter and above, we completed our first successful corporate procurement trial run.
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New Team Members: Paul Monaghan and Koppala Sai Ram
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Paul joins us as our new Welfare Standard Lead, and is an expert in infectious and neglected tropical diseases. He brings with him over a decade of global development experience, including five years at Evidence Action, and we’re hopeful that his depth of experience will enable us to significantly increase the impact and rigor of our programming.
Sai, our new Program Coordinator, is passionate about rural development and finding sustainable solutions for agriculture-related challenges. He has worked closely with agricultural farmers and Farmer Producer Organizations, and will lead our field team in Eluru, India.
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Job Openings
- We continue to hire for Field Managers and Data Collectors to work in our field sites in Andhra Pradesh, India. These positions are open only to Indian nationals. Applications run on an ongoing basis.
- We will shortly be hiring for an Operations Associate/Lead. If you’re interested, feel free to respond to this email. More information in our newsletter in a few weeks!
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Other News in Fish Welfare
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Know of other upcoming events or interesting news? Feel free to send them over, and we’ll include them next time!
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Peter Singer's latest book, Animal Liberation Now, explores humanity’s ethical responsibilities toward animals, invoking a pressing call to action to address the animal cruelty inherent in many farming systems. Using new evidence, it describes the interconnectedness of dietary habits, climate change, and public health risks, offering practical advice for change. This new adaptation of Animal Liberation is named one of TIME magazine's 100 best non-fiction books ever, and it is safe to say that Fish Welfare Initiative would not have existed without the ideas it popularized.
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A Mrigal fish. Credit: H.T.Cheng/iNaturalist
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The term Indian major carp refers to three species of fishes: Catla (Catla catla), Rohu (Labeo rohita), and Mrigal (Cirrhinus mrigala). These are the most commonly farmed species in India, and the main beneficiaries of FWI's work.
Each of the three species of Indian major carp has a different feeding habit. Catla are surface feeders, often seen splashing at the water surface as they feed. Rohu feed in the middle layers of water. Mrigal, pictured above, are bottom feeders.
This division of feeding zones allows them to coexist in the same waters without too much competition for food, as a clever adaptation.
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