Launched in October 2018, Aquaculture Frontiers is a series of six reports set out to identify the innovations that have the power to disrupt aquaculture.

Written by Undercurrent News contributor and consultant Matt Craze via Spheric Research, the series aims to cover the key topics in aquaculture innovation.

In this second instalment, Craze focuses on the salmon farming sector, and how it is tackling some of its biggest challenges.

Transforming salmon farming

Salmon farming is undergoing deep change. Blessed with massive profits and cursed with biological challenges, farmers are funneling investments into new production methods that might make current sea farming methods look obsolete in the near future.

Oslo-traded SalMar has harvested fish at its massive Ocean Farm 1 pen, which is more than 100 meters wide. Norway’s salmon farming companies are spending billions of dollars on state-of-the-art recirculating aquaculture technology (RAS) smolt farms. And Atlantic Sapphire has stocked its massive RAS grow-out farm near Miami with fish.

Emerging middle classes in Asian countries are driving up volume demand and underpinning prices. The small group of producer countries located at temperate latitudes of the northern and southern hemispheres can’t keep up with this steamroller demand.

China and Korea are looking at developing their own salmon farming systems in offshore locations and could receive considerable backing from regional investors.

At the same time, Norwegian leaders such as Mowi (formerly Marine Harvest) and Mitsubishi-owned Cermaq Group are working hard to maintain their current licenses to operate amid growing opposition to salmon farming in areas such as Canada's British Columbia.

The sector needs its technological push to start delivering results, not least in reducing sealice levels, disease and operational catastrophes. Aquaculture Frontiers, part 2: Who will disrupt the salmon industry?, provides a broad snapshot of the industry as it stands today, and assesses where it is headed.

View sample

This instalment analyses: 

• Current supply and demand issues
• Key challenges in reformulating the industry's relationship with First Nations groups and other stakeholders in British Columbia (and other parts of the world)
• The growing toolbox that the industry has to combat chief disease challenges and sealice
• Closed containment systems and RAS deployed at both the smolt and grow out stage of salmon farming
• Offshore developments, with a focus Chinese and Korean efforts to open up new salmon farming areas

The report also offers 10 predictions for the years ahead.

About the authors:

• Based out of Chile, lead writer Matt Craze has written about the salmon aquaculture sector for more than a decade and spent the last year talking to the industry’s leading executives to compile this report, visiting farms in Chile, the US and South Korea
• Co-author Tarah Mayes, who contributed heavily to the sections on biological challenges, is an aquaculture scientist
• Maaike Tiersma, an expert in conservation science, addresses the sustainability issues with a focus on the current status of stakeholder concerns in British Columbia

The report continues on from Part 1, which focused on RAS systems.

The three remaining reports will focus on the main topics in aquaculture and assess how this rapidly evolving activity can achieve sustainable growth.

Available as a one-off, or series

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