234 FISHERY INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTS 



Supply. Perhaps the greatest problem, rather surprisingly, is to get a 

 supply of raw material that is both adequate and stable. Too often a plant 

 is started to utilize a resource — say of trash fish from the shrimp boats — 

 that seems tremendously large and inexhaustible. Too late it is found that 

 this raw material cannot be brought to a central plant at a price that 

 makes it possible to produce meal at the going market price and still make 

 enough profit to survive. 



In our example, the shrimp fisherman does not want to use ice and hold 

 space for trash fish unless it makes money for him, but these fish are low 

 in oil — no profit there. This means that if meal is worth $110 a ton and 

 we use the usual conversion ratio of five raw fish to one meal, then if our 

 meal plant operator has to pay $20 a ton (only a cent a pound) for raw fish, 

 he has only $10 per ton for all other costs: labor, fuel, bags, maintenance, 

 etc. 



To operate he has to figure out some way of getting fish for about $15 

 a ton and this is, unfortunately, next to impossible. However, even if he 

 gets raw fish at a profitable price, he still may fail because he does not 

 have a stable supply of fish available from month to month and year to 

 year in quantities large enough to justify the overhead of labor and other 

 basic costs for minimum operations. 



It is so common that it may be considered typical for fish to come in 

 very heavy supply then drop off to a low level. ''Fisherman's luck" is all 

 too accurately descriptive of the uncertainty of the catch. Thus plants 

 must be built large enough to capitalize on the gluts during the period of 

 heavy landings and yet designed so that they can operate with fair 

 efficiency at perhaps Ho of the maximum capacity. 



Quality. Fish meal quality will be discussed in detail in another chapter, 

 but the problem of producing fish meal of reasonably uniform quality from 

 raw material that is rarely uniform either in composition, freshness, or 

 even species of fish is a very real problem. This situation has become in- 

 creasingly serious as greater knowledge of nutritional requirements and 

 scientific formulation of broiler diets put a premium on the uniformity in 

 quality of each ingredient of the broiler-feed mixture. 



Plant Location. Other problems are derived from the nature of the fish 

 meal industry. Plants built years ago find resort areas building on nearby 

 water fronts and urban expansion pushing residential sections even closer 

 on the land sides. No longer can these plants afford to neglect the problems 

 of odor and water pollution that were unnoticed in earlier conditions of 

 semi-isolation. New plants must be initially designed with consideration 

 of problems of water pollution and odor prevention. 



The dryer is the source of most objectionable odors as the volatile 

 odoriferous substances are freed by heat and carried away in the large 

 volumes of air moving through the dryers. Wash towers and waste gas 



