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Hey there,
We hope you’re doing well! The main theme of our newsletter this month is exploration—specifically, how most of our programming now is focused on building the foundation for future implementation. You can read how this idea manifests in our different activities below.
In other news, applications for our Operations Lead/Associate role close this Sunday. As this role will be tasked with managing all of FWI’s operations, we’ll favor applicants with prior operations experience. However, no prior experience is strictly necessary—we ultimately care much more that you have a strong attention to detail and a systems-optimization mindset.
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Candidates from any region are welcome to apply. However, as much of the work will involve supporting our team in India, we unfortunately won’t be hiring anyone based in the Americas given the time-zone differences.
Know someone who could be a good fit? Please pass on this email to them, as referrals are how we attract many of our best candidates!
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Have a great week!
Haven King-Nobles
Executive Director
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Bettering Our Welfare Improvements
We work to improve the lives of the most commonly farmed fishes in India: Indian major carp. However, despite their massive numbers, the literature on their welfare is frustratingly sparse.
This means that in order to effectively help them we need to do some of this research ourselves along the way. We’re currently running two such welfare studies in the field:
Study #1: Feed management.
This 10-month study is designed to test whether better feed management will improve water quality (and thus improve fish welfare). We’re hopeful that this could be a useful addition to our current welfare standard, which mostly solves issues reactively. If feed management proves effective, it could solve welfare issues before they ever become a problem.
Study #2: Focus farms observational study.
This 3-month study will involve heavy monitoring of “focus farms”—a term we’re using to describe the minority of farms that, perhaps for reasons beyond the farmers' control, seem to account for the majority of welfare challenges. Our thinking here is that if we can effectively understand what’s going on in these farms, and how we can work with the farmers to improve conditions, then we could better prioritize our resources to where they’re most needed.
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FWI Research Assistant Manikanta measures water turbidity using a Secchi disk at a farm for our observational study.
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As great as it would be if we had all the studies we needed and could just focus on implementation, that’s not the reality we find ourselves in. So at least for now, more research is really needed!
And if you’re curious, you can request access to our internal protocols of either the feed management or observational study.
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Testing Methods of Scaling
As discussed in our last newsletter, our farmer program in India—the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture (ARA)—is now onboarding new farms again. So far, this quarter we’ve added 24 new farms, and plan to add another 26 by the end of September.
Our purpose in onboarding these farms right now is not just having an immediate impact. Rather, our main goals here have more to do with exploration and program development:
- Exploring what it’s like to operate in a new context: We’re adding these farms in a different community, Jalipudi, where we haven’t worked before.
- Stress-testing our protocols for adding farms to the ARA at scale: We will need our protocols to be extremely effective if our theory of change is to work at scale.
These farms are largely being added through individual farmer outreach. However, we’re also investigating avenues of mass farmer outreach:
- Department of Fisheries: We recently met with the Additional Director of State Fisheries, who presented us with the opportunity of working directly with Fish Farmer Producer Organizations. These larger collectives of farmers could allow us to reach many farmers at once.
- Certification: Our Corporate Outreach Manager Subrata recently met with the NSF, a global certification body, in order to explore the possibility of them adding aquaculture certification in India. Certification is still a ways away in contexts like Indian fish aquaculture, but we think these are important conversations to begin having.
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Carps being “harvested” at one of our partner farms a week ago. The process of being dragged out of the water and left to asphyxiate on the ground is probably the worst suffering these animals will experience, and yet, given the infrastructural and technological barriers in implementing stunning, this is a welfare issue we haven’t (yet) figured out how to solve. (Editorial note: Many of the fishes are still alive in this photo—see their gasping mouths—and we know it can be unpleasant viewing, but we think it's important to not look away from the realities of these systems.)
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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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Indian major carp fishes have rings on their scales that can provide clues about their age. The concentric rings—called annuli—appear on scales and represent growth periods in a fish’s life. They can also be formed due to seasonal variations: in regions with distinct seasons, a fish might grow rapidly during warmer months and slower during colder months. Typically, one set of rings (a wide and a narrow one together) indicates one year of a fish's life.
By counting annuli, researchers in India have found that wild Indian major carp can live to be more than 8 years.
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