Feeding a growing population with sustainable aquaculture
The oceans cover more than 70 percent of the earth. Only 2 to 3 percent of the global food production comes from the oceans. Still, the oceans are dramatically overfished. More than 100 million tons of fish are consumed worldwide – more than the fish population can produce. In order to produce sufficient animal protein from seafood in a sustainable way, aquaculture is becoming increasingly important.
Practical examples of how electrification, automation and digitalization support aquaculture
Aquaculture is becoming increasingly important for global food production. In order to ensure sustainable protein production, modern technology helps to improve energy efficiency, plant availability, product quality, and overall productivity.Clean energy for salmon sea farming in Norway
With focus on the environment in the calm fjords as well as securing the fish health, the government and the farmers realized the necessary of building large and secured ocean aquaculture farms to be located in rough water.
Reliable power supply from land
Norwegian company Nordlaks is building the 385 meter long and nearly 60 meter wide Havfarm 1 in the Norwegian sea. The sea farm will operate in more exposed waters than is common in today's aquaculture industry. After completion in 2020, Nordlaks plans to add a 7.5-kilometer power cable with a capacity of 3.5 megawatts to the sea farm so that it is supplied with clean energy from land. Nordlaks chose Siemens as the technology partner for automation with SIMATIC S7-1500 and the Totally Integrated Automation Portal (TIA Portal), network products for production platform and administration platform, SINAMICS G150 drives, transformers, and generators.
IoT-based quality monitoring of fish feed
Raisioagro is shipping fish feed to fish farms across Finland as well as in Russia and must meet the high quality requirements set by its customers. To ensure stable product quality, continuous monitoring of the production process is required.
Collecting data from all areas
In order to trace any potential quality defects and to respond appropriately to any complaints from customers, Raisioagro needs to collect data from every production batch. The available process data was found to be scattered in various distributed locations with a lack of centralized management and utilization. With the help of Siemens, Raisioagro managed to establish a connectivity and data management solution that could be easily integrated with all the existing automation systems as well as with new equipment in the future. MindSphere, the open Industrial IoT operating system from Siemens, was the best match to answer these requirements. As a result, product quality has already been improved with the knowledge derived from collected and visualized data.
The aquaculture value chain is demanding specific solutions that support every relevant aspect. Siemens brings to the table long-standing experience and solutions for fish feed production as well the required equipment for providing a sustainable environment for fish production. This enables aquaculture companies to optimally measure water parameters, flow, level, pressure, and weight. By integrating cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, edge computing and blockchain, companies can continuously optimize their operation.
Perfect match with customer needs
Products and solutions for the aquaculture industry are not one-size-fits-all. With the co-creation approach from Siemens, the solutions match the specific requirements of each company.
The most important thing for us is to obtain relevant information from the production process in order to improve control. Access to this new information helps us increase the consistency of product quality by reducing the quality variance between production batches.“Petri Elonen, quality engineer at Raisioagro
Generating added value for the aquaculture industry
The aquaculture industry is in a transition phase. In order to achieve additional growth, it needs to tackle environmental challenges, develop new farming concepts, and to consistently integrate automation and digitalization into their value chain.
Developing new opportunities
Siemens has established a Center of Competence for the aquaculture industry where our experts are working on supporting companies to realize their digital transformation. This support ranges from products and solutions to consulting and services. This way companies of any size can start their digitalization process at any point of their value chain.