Improving aquaculture sea farm sustainabilty and efficiency through ai technology to help farmers management operation

Aquaculture is one of the main levers for feeding the world of tomorrow, but the activity is affected by the global warming and the increase in ocean temperatures, which affect the oxygen level into water, a key parameter for the fish health and fish appetite (Remen 2016) and directly affect the operations in the sea, mainly on fish feeding management.

In this context, management support through live environmental data is no longer sufficient, and the need for prediction tools becomes essential to adjust daily decisions, in particular feeding actions. State of the art in the salmon industry shows that in summer up to 21% of the feed can be given during suboptimal period, when up to 70% of the operating costs are concentrated in feed expenditure, and which is heavily dependent on wild fisheries that are already stressed.

Changing the practices in the daily operation is a key challenge to improve sea farm sustainability, and by extension, production performance.

BiOceanOr's predictive tools, based on AI and machine learning from local and external data collection, allow the farmer to better adjust the feeding window, and strongly contribute to reducing the suboptimal feeding time, by maximising the amount of feed given in the best period for fish appetite, despite a high intra-day oxygen fluctuation.

These predictive digital tools help the farmer to avoid feed losses to the sea, increasing the sustainability of the activity and improving both (i) farmer savings by improving eFCR, (ii) maximising the fish growth by increasing SGR, leading to a reduction in time fish spend at sea. These AI powered tools provide a good overview of how technological innovation can support aquaculture and marine sustainability while keeping economic performance as a goal.