Algae makes a great alternative food source to traditional grains for livestock—and it requires less energy to produce an equivalent amount of feed. Traditional farming requires a lot of heavy equipment, which relies on fossil fuels. Plowing and tilling also causes the loss of topsoil, and farming leads to soil demineralization. What’s more, growing crops to feed livestock takes a lot of land, whereas algae ponds require far less land. When supplementing feed with algae, farmers can reduce their land investment in crops and use the extra space to produce more livestock.
Algae in and of itself has a variety of nutritional values depending on the species grown. Because there are so many types available, it is possible to grow algae with a nutritional profile to support just about any type of livestock. It is even possible to create a closed loop system in which livestock manure is used to feed the algae, thus producing the feed needed to grow the livestock. Currently, the most commonly farmed type of algae used in food production is phytoplankton, which is used to feed farm-raised fish, but this is expected to change as the demand for land grows.
