Bergen, Norway-based aquaculture analytics firm Manolin has launched a new data tracking tool – dubbed Innsikt – to help salmon farmers track, compare, and improve sea lice treatment strategies.
Manolin was founded last year by two software engineers, including a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, via the Hatch accelerator program.
Innsikt is a web-based platform that enables farmers to identify which treatment strategies have been the most successful. It was built after Manolin crunched treatment data from across the entire industry, isolated metrics, and developed an overall score that measures treatment strategy effectiveness since 2015, company CEO Tony Chen told SeafoodSource.
“There’s a lot of information out there with no tools to navigate it,” Manolin CEO Tony Chen said. “We’re not here to tell the farmers what to do. They are extremely good at what they do, and we hope that our information can be another tool for them to utilize. In the face of unpredictability, whether it’s the weather conditions or fish health, we believe one way to really measure if a treatment works is to compare with rest of the industry. For example, by using our treatment profiles, farmers can track if their use of preventative treatments, such as cleanerfish, had the same effect on their farms as others across Norway.”
Trying new sea lice treatment strategies is both expensive and often risky, Chen said, and Innsikt is designed to give information to aquaculture firms about which treatments are most effective and give them the ability to track their progress in combating sea lice after treatment has begun.
Chen said salmon-farming companies are becoming more interested in his company’s technology as the costs associated with sea lice have risen. He said a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers showed sea lice now impact 17 percent of all production costs, up 233 percent since 2010.
Blom’s CFO Hårvard Tennebø said his company has found success using Innsikt.
“We are using the data in Innsikt to lay the groundwork for how to change our treatment strategies in the future,” Tennebø said. “With just a few clicks, I’m able to put together information that would have previously taken me…quite honestly a lot of time.”
