Newly-developed data technology from Danish company Blue Unit has been adopted by Norwegian fish farming giant SalMar Settefisk, courtesy of a new collaboration between the firms.
The collaboration began in 2020, after SalMar contacted Blue Unit to help improve production and “avoid potential challenges” at its Senja facility, located near Tromsø.
SalMar implemented the second version of Blue Unit Solution, a data analysis tool equipped with “specially designed censors to collect data on 12 vital water quality parameters from up to 12 locations on a farm simultaneously,” Blue Unit said. Alarms in the Blue Unit Solution monitor system tell SalMar “where and why a change in the water quality occurs,” the company said, providing “optimal conditions for monitoring critical parameters and optimizing the farm on the basis of real-time information updates.”
“To us smolt producers, accurate measurements in the tanks are vital to obtaining stable water quality and the best conditions for sustainability and growth. With Blue Unit Solution, our monitoring process changed from manually measuring a few times a day to retrieving automized measurements continuously throughout the day. This gives us new possibilities to monitor and adjust our production,” SalMar Senja Director of Biology and Water Chemistry Stein Roar Ernstsen said.
Under construction since 2017, the Senja facility is the largest of its kind in the world, with a license to produce 34 million smolts, according to SalMar.
“As part of developing the facility, SalMar and Blue Unit agreed that the new smolt farm would also be a test unit for version two of Blue Unit’s data visualization system,” the companies said.
Adjustments and additions have been applied to the system over the course of the collaboration so far “to get the best possible collections of data and analyses, and several parameters have received special attention,” they said.
“Blue Unit makes it, among other things, possible to monitor the level of CO2 pH, oxygen, salinity, clarity and H2S in our fish tanks in a way that was impossible before. These are important indicators of water quality, and with these new tools we expect to become even better at controlling our consumption of fish feed, reducing our expenses, ensuring animal welfare, and producing robust smolt,” Blue Unit said.
Blue Unit Founder David Owen said the firm has followed SalMar’s farms closely, and been “challenged with demands and expectations that made it necessary for us to perform optimally and evolve professionally – with regards to both version one and version two.”
“This knowledge can be used on farms worldwide in the future,” Owen said.
Photo courtesy of Blue Unit
