Watching Faroe Farming feed their salmon at one of their on-growing cages in the Vágsfjörður fjord, Suðuroy, would give you a sense of their fish farming philosophy. So we get ourselves on board a workboat custom fitted for delivering food to the salmon, together with managing partner and co-founder Erhard Joensen and two of his staff.
The vessel is stuffed with just about 10 tons of expensive feed and Mr Joensen is about to explain one of the best kept, open secrets in the aquaculture business.
Its in the feeding method and in the feed itself, he says to the sound of the feeder spraying over the cage. One of the lads has immersed an underwater camera 7-8 meters down inside the cage and watches a monitor in the wheelhouse showing salmon swimming back and forth. As soon as the camera starts capturing feed particles sinking down, we know the fish arent eating everything they get and that means its time to stop the feeding, he says.
Mr Joensen fills him in. Its of paramount importance to dose correctly not only because the amounts of feed you use is a major financial factor; an even more serious side of the issue is that overfeeding causes sediments to build on the seabed underneath with a disruptive effect on the ecological balance in the marine environmentwhich in turn can be devastating for the fish. And besides, it can cost you the license to release any smolt into the area for the next couple of years. This is something that not only the veterinary authority is keeping a sharp eye onits a hard learned lesson.
Into Retail market? Mr Joensen has himself many years of experience in the aquaculture industry; when he joined a consolidation effort in the local Vágur industry to form Faroe Farming in late 2003, the business took over licenses and salmon smolt from others, only to find out months later that the smolt had caught a disastrous disease.
The entire years of 2004 and 2005 were spent in a desperate fight to stay afloat. Luckily we managed to convince investors that raising the capital would be worthwhile because we knew we could turn this into a sound business. Since 2006 things have been moving steadily in the right direction and were now approaching maximum biomass.
That will be about one million individual salmon distributed over 13 to 14 on-growing cages, corresponding to approximately 4,000 metric tons of head-on, gutted salmon, exported fresh to the UK and continental Europe.
Farming salmon is pretty much like farming anything else you have to keep close watch and pay attention every day.
Thats another reason why we do the feeding manually; it enables us to monitor the process properly. The market for fresh whole salmon is known as highly volatile with prices fluctuating to make planning difficult. For this reason, processing for the retail sector at lower, more stable prices could become an attractive option.
One of our colleagues has shown the way here, Mr Joensen notes. Theyve been exporting fresh portions for quite a while and with good results. Were in fact considering our options and depending on a few things related to logistics and labor, well start small-scale production of portions before long in order to evaluate more closely whether we should enter that market. Looking a bit further into the future, farmed cod could be a supplement to salmon. Ongoing research and development, both private and public, is indicating good potential and competitive advantage for farmed cod from a Faroe Bank broodstock.
Were sure keeping an eye on cod, too, Mr Joensen says. But for the immediate future, well be very busy with all this salmon.
Back to the feed. Mr Joensen stresses that the salmon feed used by Faroe Farming is of the highest quality, made from fishmeal and marine oil without vegetable substitutes.
I believe marine food with lots of Omega 3 fatty acids is the best a salmon can get. Its the natural diet and it gives the meat that high quality and a healthy look, with the right color, and the right taste. The feed we use is always fresh from the Havsbrún factory, never imported. Theres no other feed that we know of that contains as high percentage of marine ingredients so this is what we want for our fish. Its simply the best.
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