New digital era opens door to innovation

In a one-day conference ahead of this year’s Aquaculture Awards, delegates from across the sector heard about the power of artificial intelligence to transform farming operations, digital tools for optimised feeding, semi-permeable pen liners to protect against sea lice and toxic algal blooms, and new innovation hubs.

The first Aquaculture UK awards day conference, held in Inverness on June 19, was opened by Scottish Rural Affairs minister Mairi Gougeon, who reiterated her government’s commitment to the growth of the sector.

Delivering her address via a video link, Gougeon said she had seen the impact aquaculture makes in Scottish communities and she welcomed the opportunity to celebrate the hard work of both those in the Scottish sector and overseas nominees in that night’s awards ceremony.

‘Scotland is open for business,’ she said, stressing the importance of Scotland, as a coastal nation, investing in the future of a low carbon protein that is worth £760 million (GVA) annually to the Scottish economy, with exports valued at £844 million last year.

Growing the sector depends on harnessing the power of technology to improve operational efficiency, and crucial to this is the deployment of AI (artificial intelligence) on farms, said keynote speaker Keith Davidson, chief technology officer at Dundee based supplier Ace Aquatec.

Exploring how AI is transforming aquaculture, from early-stage disease detection and biomass estimation to feed optimisation and sustainability monitoring, he said farmers already collect huge amounts of data, but with AI they were able to pull all the information together and identify patterns and trends to make better decisions.
As well as providing accurate biomass measurement for harvesting, by leveraging AI farmers can predict environmental problems, such as harmful algal blooms, and address potential threats. And AI driven disease prevention will lead to earlier, or fewer, treatments.

Davidson, who has helped bring Ace Aquatec’s biomass camera technology to market, said the sector is now ‘scratching the surface’ of AI’s potential, and eventually it will be used in everything from genetic selection to the design of pens, with totally automated farms a plausible vision of the future.
The adoption of digital tools for feeding optimisation was the subject of the next session, which included a panel of experts from Sparos, Veramaris, Mowi and the University of Stirling’s Institute of Aquaculture.

Mowi’s Don Macleod, regional seawater manager for the Western Isles and Skye, said the impact of AI was evident in the company’s new Remote Operations Centre (ROC) at Fort William, which centralises the feeding of more than 15 marine farms and ensures that feeding strategies are optimised.
Opened last year, the results are already impressive, he said, with Mowi’s Gorsten farm recently recording a FCR (feed conversion rate) of 1.002, the most efficient ever recorded at Mowi for full production fish, anywhere in the world.

Mowi is planning a second ROC at Stornoway, said Macleod, adding that the use of predictive tools in the new digital age would make farming practices more proactive and less reactive, allow the company to push further offshore, develop submersible farms, and enable controlled expansion.
The main obstacle to adopting AI on farms is cost, according to a snap poll of delegates, with just nine per cent saying they were ‘very familiar’ with AI tools in aquaculture and use them regularly.

Stephanie Arnott from novel feed producer Veramaris said the company’s digital tool – the Omega-3 Deposition (O3D) model, which identifies levels of EPA and DHA in feed and its subsequent distribution in fillets – supported the sector by securing the reputation of salmon as a healthy food.
In the next iteration of the model, Veramaris, which produces a natural marine algal oil, was working on the variability of omega-3 levels, in cooked fish, for instance, as the model was based on raw salmon, and also from one cut to another.

UK Agri-Tech Centre’s Martin Sutcliffe led a discussion on the introduction of an innovation farm in Scotland, a long-time aspiration that has yet to be realised.
With a panel including Iain Berrill from Salmon Scotland, Anneli Hill of Crown Estate Scotland, Rhianna Rees of the Scottish Seaweed Industry Association, Ben Perry of Ace Aquatec and the Roslin Institute’ Tim Regan, he outlined the requirements and purpose of a dedicated trial site.

A poll of delegates found that more than 50 per cent believed aninnovation farm was important to the sector but that bottlenecks to achieving such a goal included regulatory red tape, lack of funding, lack of cross sector collaboration, and lack of large-scale test sites.

Berrill said the reason Scotland had failed to create innovation sites, as Norway has done, was not unwillingness to invest but regulatory hurdles. To be truly innovative, an innovation farm must be able to operate outside the regulatory framework so new concepts can be trialled.

However, the sector currently has to apply for planning permission for even a six-month trial. It takes around four to five years to get planning permission for a standard farm. Flexibility in farming demands flexibility in regulations but these remain rigid.

Enabling mindset

Salmon farmers, he said, would not invest in new equipment or ways of farming that had not been trialled, but Scotland’s regulatory regime is not conducive to testing new products or systems. If an innovation farm achieved one thing it would be to create an enabling mindset among regulators, and open the door to a more open-minded approach to how we farm our fish.

One of the delegates, Mark Shotter of Loch Long Salmon, which has been waiting for 16 months for a government decision on its innovative scheme for a semi-closed containment system, said his company’s experience demonstrated how the sector in Scotland is very good at R&D but very poor at commercial roll-out.

Sutcliffe said UK Agri-Tech was planning to host a workshop in the autumn to discuss the innovation farm proposals further.

In the next session, Andrew Bett of Scottish company Salar Pursuits explained the technology behind Smoltscreen and Bloomshield semi-permeable aquaculture systems.

Farming salmon within conventional pens lined with partially or fully enclosed nylon mesh offers up to 100 per cent protection, through filtration, against sea lice, jellyfish and harmful algal blooms while preserving optimal seawater conditions and biosecurity.

Bett said that without an innovation farm in Scotland he had carried out proof of concept tests at the Marine Institute in Ireland and full-scale trials in Norway, led by the Institute of Marine Research (IMR) and involving technology research organisation SINTEF, among others.

Asked if an innovation farm in Scotland would have sped up the trials process, Bett said ‘without a doubt’, adding that he could have launched his system on to the market two years ago.

In the final session, the Institute of Aquaculture’s Dave Little and Trevor Telfer provided an update on the IoA’s new research centre, the National Aquaculture Technology and Innovation Hub (NATIH), which is due to be completed on August 15.

The centre, which will be commissioned from September to January before opening officially for trials, would tie together the sector’s training needs and enable cutting edge R&D and innovation, with 48 RAS tanks, environmental tanks and three flow-through systems.

The facility will complement the IoA’s existing research facilities, including marine and freshwater centres at Machrihanish in Kintyre and Buckieburn, and will build on the Institute’s international reputation for world-class research, teaching, technological innovation and consultancy in aquaculture.

‘We would like NATIH to become the home of innovation,’ said Little.