The first fish from salmon farming giant Cermaq's groundbreaking iFarm in Martnesvika, Norway, have been harvested and sent to customers in Asia and Europe.
iFarm, developed in conjunction with BioSort, is based on image recognition, allowing identification of each individual salmon and the care of each individual fish.
"Checking the fish in real time with cameras from multiple angles opens up to tell more about each fish, but at the same time it requires a lot from the software and hardware solutions we develop," said BioSort General Manager Geir Stang Hauge.
The technology is designed to cut costs and reduce the handling of the fish related to sea lice treatment, thereby improving fish health and welfare. The technology is central to Cermaq's strategy of strengthening coastal farming.
The project, which will develop what Cermaq calls "individual aquaculture," is planned to run over the next five years. In the first phase, the main task has been adapting the iFarm equipment in the pen to the fish's behavior and ensuring the fish are healthy.
"The fish behavior we have observed in Phase 1 tells us that the fish is doing fine with the iFarm equipment in the pen," said Cermaq’s iFarm project manager Karl Fredrik Ottem. "This is further supported by the results from the harvest. The fish have had a good life in the iFarm pens."
Heavily reduced de-licing
The need for de-licing was reduced by 50 percent in the iFarm pens compared to the conventional pens onsite, and the scoring of welfare indicators was good throughout the production.
The iFarm concept cannot be combined with ordinary underwater feeding equipment, and the harvest results showed there is a need for further development of the underwater feeding system to achieve as good a feeding factor as Cermaq normally gets.
The first production has also provided important experience in terms of solutions for integration between various main components of iFarm and how these should be further developed to improve handling operations and daily operations.
The further development of iFarm - Phase 2 - is taking place in Vesteralen, Norway, where an entire sea site stocked with fish has been equipped with the iFarm setup in all the pens. In this phase, there will be full-scale testing of the concept and technology.
"We have learned a lot that we have already implemented in Phase 2, and we have received a number of answers that take us to the next step," said Ottem. "An important part of the innovation work is to find out what works and what does not work."
