Aquaculture

Your Challenge:

Underwater fish farms are shallow water environments that experience adverse conditions. Turbid and choppy water occurs near the water’s surface and in the nets that hold each stage of a fish’s development. With little advanced technology to monitor this constantly changing environment, farmers are at risk of losing valuable income because they don’t have enough information at their fingertips.

This high potential for negative conditions to go undetected means stock health is often adversely affected. A farmer with half a dozen nets of fish at different stages of development can potentially lose significant revenue if any net is negatively impacted for any reason. Margins are tight in the industry and with fish food accounting for up to 80% of a farmer’s costs, efficiency is imperative. The nature of this unpredictable environment means that fish farmers often have ad-hoc systems for environmental monitoring. Yet at the same time, there’s an inherent understanding that if they could monitor more of their working environment, they could potentially improve the health of the stock they have.

Technology is not in widespread use at most shallow water fish farms. Instead, they rely on labour-intensive, more traditional means of getting data by going out by boat. Once there, typically, they drop a probe via a wire into the water to take a water sample to measure ocean temperature and dissolved oxygen levels in one or two locations. After returning to shore, the data is manually entered, often into a spreadsheet, and then sent on to head office.