Norway emerges as surprise leader in developing land-based salmon farms
Growing salmon to harvest weight in land-based farms is a technology that could potentially unseat the dominance of top industry suppliers Norway and Chile. But it is also an opportunity for two producing nations to leverage their operational expertise.
Norway, surprisingly, is developing more land-based farms than any other country, including China, Japan, and the US. There are more than 20 land-based salmon farms currently under consideration in Norway, according to The Land-based Salmon Handbook, a joint publication by Spheric Research and Undercurrent News. This surpasses the 14 projects we identified for the US market.
If all developed, Norway would add 483,800 metric tons of salmon supply to the 1.3 million metric tons that it currently produces from traditional sea-pen farming. There are only five other projects to grow salmon on land in the rest of Europe, and the biggest of those will be built on the Swedish coast, 20 miles away from the border with Norway.
This new generation of land-based Norwegian salmon farms will plug this new supply into the existing infrastructure in Norweigan exporters, shippers, and marketers of salmon. There has been a marked increase in new project announcements in the last couple of years as the government is issuing free licenses for companies that set up land-based farms in the Scandinavian country.
Norway has significant advantages to succeed in land-based salmon farming as well as the traditional sea-pen base because of the technical and financial expertise in the country. Norway's salmon industry has built more than 50 recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) to grow bigger juvenile salmon or smolt. Operating these systems have given dozens of engineers the expertise to lead land-based projects since they understand the mechanics of RAS technology.
Many of the projects that have arisen to grow salmon on land are an update on flow-through systems, which have been by the industry for decades to raise salmon smolt. These modern grow-out systems will place the fish in tanks located right next to the sea and treat effluents from the plant in innovative ways.
One company, Andfjord Salmon, will use remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to collect sludge at the base of the pools. The company was successfully listed on the Oslo stock exchange and was oversubscribed in a private placement. Norwegian investors have grown used to outsized gains on the salmon industry, which has routinely outperformed the oil and gas and shipping industries on the country's stock exchange.
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