Animal AgTech Innovation Summit and the future of aquaculture | The Fish Site

French insect producer Ynsect won a €20 million grant from the European Commission to build a new automated facility to produce premium insect protein, due to open in 2021. AquaByte, an aquaculture start-up that brings machine learning and computer vision technologies to improve fish farming efficiency, has raised $10 million in Series A Funding to double its team and expand in different countries.

The sector has seen unprecedented developments focused on digital innovation, land-based aquaculture and genetic technologies

Digital innovation

Fundamental to aquaculture is understanding how fish grow and what factors influence fish growth from a health, feeding, and biomass perspective. The industry is shifting towards precision fish farming, enabled by technologies including machine-learning and computer vision.

Bryton Shang, Founder & CEO at Aquabyte, says: “We can promote the adoption of these technologies that give us a digital snapshot of how the fish is growing over time. Growing camera and sensor instrumentation at the farm will be important, so we can understand precisely how each fish grows, how many sea lice it has, how hungry it is, and what we should do to feed and keep the fish healthy.

“Over time, more and more of these innovations will be powered by software. For the industry to scale, we need to embrace the role of software, internet connectivity, and machine learning technologies to help the farmer better run the farm. This will require the joint efforts of farms, government agencies, institutions, researchers, and suppliers to work together to make sure that the right technologies are being developed for farmers.”

Land-based aquaculture

Land-based aquaculture operations or recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) systems offer fully traceable, healthy, natural fish without the use of antibiotics or chemicals.