Technological innovations and collaborations are helping Denmark-based fish and shrimp feed manufacturer BioMar produce more sustainable and effective aqua-feeds.
At the Global Aquaculture Alliance’s GOAL 2018 conference 25 to 27 September in Guayaquil, Ecuador, BioMar Global Sustainability Director Vidar Gundersen said the company has initiated a collaboration with Ecuadorian shrimp farmers to develop a “premium, sustainable shrimp product.”
Through its holdings in Ecuador as a result of its 2017 acquisition of Alimentsa, BioMar is working with Ecuador’s Sustainable Shrimp Partnership to improve the sustainability of the industry’s raw material sourcing. As part of that effort, the company will soon open the BioMar Aquaculture Technology Centre in Ecuador, aiming to take lessons learned from its salmon feed development and apply them to the shrimp sector. The company built a similar center aimed at improving the Chilean salmon industry in February 2017.
“We can take the learnings from other species and apply them to create a truly sustainable shrimp choice for retailers and the end-consumers,” Gundersen said. “We hope to initiate new projects with our customers, which can accelerate the development of high value shrimp products.”
The company is also exploring other ways to use technology to improve its products and processes. It recently initiated a new experimental project under the auspices of the Danish Green Development and Demonstration Programme (GUDP) that will allow gathering and sharing of data between feed suppliers and salmon farming companies to create “a higher degree of knowledge-sharing, better research, and optimised production follow-up,” according to a press release.
"For BioMar, the aim is to help our customers to become more efficient and more sustainable in an economically viable way,” BioMar Vice President Ole Christensen said. “Our participation in projects of this kind helps us deliver on our strategy of innovating for a sustainable aquaculture for today, and tomorrow".
The collaboration is being led by OxyGuard International and also includes other Danish companies including Danish Salmon, AquaPri, Danaqua, Aller Aqua, Kongeåens Dambrug, DTU-Aqua, as well as the University of Copenhagen. The goal of the project is to use technologies such as big data, the internet of things (IoT), and machine learning to improve salmon aquaculture practices via a cloud-based database.
"The GUDP-project aims at combining IT and aquaculture to develop smart, easy-to-deploy, user-friendly tools that can lead to a new era of connected, responsible and efficient, and thus, sustainable aquaculture,” Oxyguard International Managing Director Paw Petersen said in the release.
