Chinook salmon farmer buys biomass solution after successful pilot

Aquaculture supplier Innovasea has announced that its real-time biomass estimation solution, BiomassPro, is now in full commercial use at Creative Salmon’s farms in British Columbia, Canada after proving to be 99.7% accurate during on-site testing.

Creative Salmon, which grows organic chinook (king) salmon in Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, purchased the solution after using it for six months as part of a pilot programme that allowed Innovasea to fine tune the algorithm for chinook salmon.

“Innovasea has greatly improved our ability to forecast the size of our fish and adjust our operations as needed,” said Barb Cannon, biology manager at Creative Salmon in a press release. “BiomassPro has increased our sample sizes, improved estimation accuracy, improved efficiency, and allowed data to be available in an online platform so reports can be done remotely and at any time.”

'Spot-on estimations'

BiomassPro is an artificial intelligence-powered solution that estimates the size and weight of fish stocks in real time to help farms optimise production and reduce feeding costs. It also provides accurate growth projections to improve resource planning and sales forecasting and ultimately boost revenues.

“BiomassPro has performed incredibly well for Creative Salmon in providing spot-on biomass estimations over the last 12 months,” said Rafael Cordero, vice president of engineering at Innovasea, which is headquartered in Boston in the United States.

“The numbers they’ve seen from their actual harvests are almost identical to what BiomassPro projected. That’s invaluable for a fish farm in terms of tracking growth curves, planning feeding operations and knowing the ideal time to harvest.”

Five species

Creative Salmon, which also uses Innovasea’s Realfish Pro precision aquaculture platform to monitor and manage its operations, is now using BiomassPro at all four of its sea sites in Tofino, BC.

“We’re grateful to Creative Salmon for helping us dial in the algorithm for king salmon during the pilot program,” said Tim Stone, Innovasea’s vice president of product development. “We’re thrilled that the solution has made a difference for them in monitoring and projecting the size of their fish stocks – and that they’ll continue to use BiomassPro moving forward.”

BiomassPro is currently available for five cold and warm water species: yellowtail kingfish, red snapper, king salmon, cobia and totoaba. The algorithm for Atlantic salmon is being field tested and fine-tuned and will be available later this year.