Monitoring and Evaluation Report of Our Farm Program — July 2026

Summary

To improve our strategic and programmatic decision-making, we implement a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) plan within our farm program, the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture (ARA). This post summarizes the results from our recent ARA M&E report, covering data from January to June 2026.

January-June 2026 ARA M&E Report

FWI staff in conversation with a farmer in the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture. During this visit, staff collected a water quality sample and asked for additional information like feeding rates, fish weight, and mortalities. On the left of the picture, a farm worker is filling plastic bags with fish feed for distribution in the pond. This picture was taken at a farm in our programming region, Eluru.

About the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture

The ARA is FWI’s primary implementation program and accounts for about 17% of our annual budget. Through it, we work directly with fish farmers in Andhra Pradesh, India, to improve water quality and maintain appropriate stocking densities.

Farmers typically enroll in the ARA to reduce disease prevalence and mortality rates. Participating farms engage with our program through:

1. Regular Farm Visits: We visit each farm monthly to observe farm conditions, measure water quality, and provide corrective actions as needed.

2. Stocking Density Limit: Participating farms commit to maintaining stocking densities within predefined limits.

   1. Note that we have discontinued counting this as impact due to uncertainty about measuring welfare outcomes from stocking density reductions.

As of July 2026, the ARA program actively engages 168 farms, monitors over 10 million fishes, and has cumulatively benefited an estimated 5.18 million fishes. To learn more about the ARA program, see our blog and dashboard.

Key Findings

(Note: These findings are mostly copied from our internal report and contain somewhat more technical language than typically found in our blog.)

Water Quality Measurements and Fishes Helped

• Overall program performance: The ARA continues to operate effectively. The primary limitation remains the relatively low frequency of out-of-range (OOR) water quality measurements, currently at just 12% (though note: even though it’s a bad thing for our program to detect few OOR instances, it is a good thing for fish welfare).

  
  

• Impact efficiency: While only 12% of all measurements were out-of-range, 20% of the issues we detected and acted upon led to measurable improvements in fish welfare. This suggests that increasing the number of OOR detections could significantly enhance program impact.

  
  

• Impact by life stage: Contrary to previous years, most fishes helped came from poor water quality events on grow-out farms (67%) as opposed to breeding farms (33%).

  
  

• Cost-effectiveness: Between January and June 2026, the ARA program had an average cost-effectiveness of approximately 9 fishes per dollar. This is slightly less than the 11 fishes/dollar at the end of 2025. Our cost-effectiveness fluctuates throughout the quarters due to weather-induced spikes in water quality issues (Fig. 2).

  
  

The cost-effectiveness of our ARA program across quarters in 2024, 2025, and 2026.

Stocking Density Monitoring

ARA farmers self-report stocking densities when introducing and harvesting fishes. We verify these self-reported numbers through harvest data. 

Because stocking density appears to contribute little to impact right now, we’re weighing whether this monitoring is worth the staff time. Table 1 details the number of harvest events we evaluated and how many of the reported densities could be accurately verified.

	Count
Total harvest events evaluated:	100
Farms that overreported their SD:	11
Farms that underreported their SD:	11

Analysis of stocking density verified through harvest events observed between January and June 2026.

Note: Due to uncertainties about the welfare impact of stocking density reductions and our uncertainty in these numbers, we recently discontinued counting fishes benefitting from stocking density reductions as part of our reported impact numbers.

Key Numbers and Pond Characteristics (as of July 23, 2026)

• Farm enrollment: 191 farms enrolled, with 168 active and 133 currently stocked with fishes. 

• New farms (January–June 2026): 15 new farms added (from four different farmers.

• Program drop-outs: 1 exited the program because the farmer stopped doing aquaculture.

• Water quality issues: Only 20% of active farms experienced water quality problems in the past six months, with 40% of these encountering out-of-range conditions on just a single day (as opposed to 79% for the same period last year).

Next Steps for the ARA

This report highlighted the main challenge of our farm program: We take a lot of water quality measurements but only 12% of these require improvement and are thus eligible to be considered for impact. 

To reach our 2026 goal, we're always considering improvements to the ARA but we have thus far not been successful in identifying a revolutionary improvement. As a result, we are actively exploring separate programs that may offer better cost-effectiveness, including feed fortification and chill-kill slaughter.