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fish farms

November 17, 2021

The Kingfish Company Wants to Lead a Tech Revolution in Aquaculture

Earth’s ocean ecosystems are deteriorating. Wild fish stocks are increasingly vulnerable. And yet by the year 2050, global demand for seafood may have increased by as much as 80%, according to research from the Blue Food Assessment.

The Kingfish Company wants to help satisfy some of that demand while reducing the environmental toll of seafood production. The agtech company launched its first land-based aquaculture production facility in the Netherlands before introducing its flagship line of yellowtail kingfish products in Whole Foods Markets across the U.S. Soon, Kingfish will bring its production operations to the U.S. with a new facility in Maine.

Earlier this week, The Spoon joined Kingfish founding partner and CEO Ohad Maiman on Zoom to find out more about the company’s aquaculture technology and plans for expansion.

Why land-based aquaculture?

Traditional aquaculture has raised global seafood production capacity in recent decades, but alarms have been raised recently about the industry’s environmental impacts. Traditional fish farms can create toxic algal blooms and ocean dead zones; farmed fish can also transmit diseases to already-vulnerable wild populations. In response to these concerns, Washington state banned salmon farming in 2018, and Argentina became the first country to ban the practice this year.

Kingfish aquaculture farm

Traditional aquaculture can’t solve the seafood industry’s supply bottleneck problem, which is why the Kingfish team saw the need for an alternative model. “Thinking about the next 30 years of continued growth in demand for seafood, we saw the need for a technological solution,” Maiman told The Spoon.

Kingfish aims to solve some of the problems of traditional aquaculture, the biggest of which is ocean pollution. In underwater cage farming, animal waste and uneaten feed get released into the surrounding water. In Kingfish’s system, the flow of water is more controlled: Water is cleaned on its way into the system to maintain optimal conditions, and cleaned again on its way out to the sea.

The controlled nature of Kingfish’s farm environment also allows the company to prevent parasites or diseases from entering the system, eliminating the need to administer antibiotics or other medications (another problem of traditional aquaculture).

There’s also the problem of seafood feed: Some traditional aquaculture operations use massive quantities of wild fish to feed their farmed species. The use of lower-grade feed in traditional aquaculture can also lead to less nutritious seafood products. Because Kingfish operates in the premium seafood space, the company can source higher-quality feed options and cut down on marine ingredients—replacing fish meal with insect meal, for example.

Inside a land-based fish farm

It would be counter-intuitive if Kingfish’s land-based aquaculture system involved pulling fish from the sea and ranching them. Instead, the company maintains several broodstocks of yellowtail kingfish on-site, and uses them to sustainably generate new generations of fish.

Kingfish’s system mimics the seasonal light and temperature conditions that the fish would experience in the wild. “When the light lasts longer and the water temperature rises, and they feel it’s spring, they spawn eggs,” Maiman said.

The hatchery and larval rearing phases are key for the company, as there are no commercial sources for yellowtail kingfish fingerlings or eggs. The fish spend about 15 days in this phase, at the end of which they measure about an inch in length. Then they’re transferred to the main system, where they live for up to 11 months.

Juvenile fish at Kingfish aquaculture farm

To slaughter the animals as painlessly as possible, the company uses an electric stunner. “By the time they are harvested, they are stunned,” Maiman said. “They immediately lose consciousness at that moment and then they die in cold water, but no longer feel it.”

At Kingfish’s Netherlands facility, the system that supports the animals throughout their life cycle is run using 100% renewable energy. At the planned facility in Maine, the company anticipates that they’ll be able to source about 50% of their energy from renewables. Kingfish is also seeking out partnerships with new renewables projects in the area, as the company can commit to the long-term offtake that new projects need to take off.

The future of fish farming

As a high-value, import-dependent species, the yellowtail kingfish was an ideal pilot fish for the company. “If you go to Nobu and have yellowtail jalapeno sashimi, it will typically be flown in from Japan or Australia,” Maiman said. “We are the largest local producer in Europe and are working toward doing the same in the U.S.” By offering a domestic source for yellowtail in Europe and North America, the company can both cut the product’s transportation footprint and provide fresher fish.

Kingfish began by addressing demand for yellowtail kingfish from Japanese and Italian restaurants, but the company also sells its products in grocery stores. According to Maiman, the team is aiming for a roughly 50-50 split between sales in restaurants and high-end retail stores.

The company went public in Norway last year, and is using that fundraise to grow its Netherlands production capacity. The team is also working on pre-construction and engineering for the new Jonesport, Maine facility, and scouting out future sites in southern Europe and the West Coast of the U.S.

With this expansion, Kingfish plans to boost its yellowtail kingfish capacity—and, eventually, to begin producing its next fish species. An internal group nicknamed Kingfish X is currently deciding which species that will be. Maiman couldn’t go into detail about which fish are being considered, but he did hint that the team is looking for another import-dependent, high-value species.

The company’s overarching goal is to be at the forefront of a technology-driven paradigm shift in aquaculture. “Within the last year or two, this technology has crossed the rubicon from an experimental to a commercially viable technology,” Maiman said.

“At some point, any new technology becomes less of a mystery—and then it’s the first few companies that have been able to build scale and establish a market position that lead the sector.”

February 7, 2018

Aquabyte Casts its Machine Learning to Improve Fish Farming

It was estimated at one point that Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson ate upwards of 821 pounds of cod per year. He’s certainly an outlier, but as global demands for seafood increase, fish farms are rising to meet that challenge, with the aquaculture market projected to reach $219.42 billion by 2022. Already, half the seafood eaten in the U.S. is farmed, and a startup called Aquabyte is using machine learning and computer vision to make those farms more efficient and productive.

Using cameras mounted in fish farm pens, Aquabyte’s software monitors data such as the fishes’ biomass, feed consumption and sea lice counts. Armed with this data, fish farmers can better understand their inventory, optimize the feed process and maintain regulatory compliance to reduce harmful impact on the surrounding environment.

Aquabyte takes the data from the pen cameras and applies it to models developed by fish nutritionists to determine the optimal amount of feed to distribute, which is a percentage of the fishes’ size. Aquabyte’s software can better detect the biomass of the fish in pens, and can also “watch” the pellets fall through the water to determine how much of them the fish are eating.

Using its software, Aquabyte claims that farmers can save money by not overfeeding, and also promises to eliminate over and underselling by giving them a better sense of how many fish they will actually produce for sale.

Aquabyte’s computer vision and machine learning can also yield a positive impact on the local environments of fish farms. One of the ways it does this is through quantifying sea lice, which can be a destructive force in the close quarters of a fish farm. Not only can they destroy a farmer’s inventory, but sea lice can get out and attach themselves onto passing wild fish, eventually killing the native fish populations. This problem has gotten so bad that Norway has enacted regulations forcing farms to control the number of sea lice in their pens or face heavy penalties.

Traditionally, sea lice quantification is done manually by netting fish out of the water and counting the lice by hand. Aquabyte’s software, however, can automate this process to keep fish farms within regulatory compliance, without requiring anyone to hand-count sea lice.

Aquabyte was founded just under a year ago and has offices in San Francisco and Bergen, Norway, where its software is currently running on a few fish farms. (Between this and Hatch, Bergen is becoming a hotbed of aquaculture tech.)

Aquabyte is targeting salmon farming in Norway to start, and the company just raised a $3.5 million seed funding round last week. They will use the money to hire out a team of software engineers in San Francisco as it works to bring the commercial version of its software platform to market.

Future versions of the software will work in other parts of the world and with other fish such as trout, sea bass, and hopefully–assuming The Rock’s appetites don’t diminish–cod.

You can hear about Aquabyte in our daily spoon podcast.  You can also subscribe in Apple podcasts or through our Amazon Alexa skill. 

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