R&D Vision
Over this time the region has become a centre for much wider innovation and disruptive technologies, across multiple sectors. From the energy sector in renewables and electrification, media technology, subsea and oceanography, to health tech and life science. A community of talent and transferable skills and technology, all closely connected and focused on tackling some of the big challenges of our age; healthy environments and healthier lives.
Moving salmon farming onto land seemed like a strange idea a few years ago, but, like many strange ideas of pioneers, today it is fast becoming the new norm. The next generation of salmon farming has to be land based, and in the center of it all stands the West Coast of Norway with Viking Aqua as the driving force.
West Norway. Photo by Emilie Lmt, Unsplash
Our ambition is to produce the happiest, healthiest, and best tasting salmon in the world. In order to do so we will create a stable and optimal environment for the fish with minimal external disturbances and fish welfare as the central indicator.
Trusted data at scale (Big Data) is the foundation of everything we do and is secured through our end-end data framework. We are basing this on a cloud native data platform with support for edge computing and a fish farm native data model. Quality control, context and insight are all driven by sophisticated algorithms and advanced machine learning.
Based on our trusted data, amazing employees and world leading academics, we are aiming at establishing the best possible conditions for the salmon living on our farm. We are doing this through close monitoring of environment parameters (temperature, oxygen, food, contamination and many more) at the same time as we carefully adjust the operation of the facility according to latest in-house and external research.
Photo by AquaGen
Photo by Uriel SC, Unsplash
Stable operations with minimal disturbance of the salmon is key to good fish welfare. Automation is proven across industries to drive stability and remove human errors, and we believe this also has a significant unrealized potential in fish farming, with a particular relevance in a fully controlled environment of a land based farm. High quality data and cutting edge algorithms will be able to act very early on suboptimal changes in the environment and execute required actions even before it is noticeable for humans.
To prove our commitment to openness, quality and fish welfare our traceability theme aims to document and track the entire lifecycle of the salmon for the benefit of customers, authorities and fish health personnel. This will be based on fully open cryptographic ledger technology.
In areas where our technological demand cannot be filled by existing products, our innovation hub ‘Viking Lab’ will aim to develop these products or services with targeted partners. Viking Lab will be our innovation center where we, together with leading research and competence environments, academia, start-ups and other exciting players, will create fish farm technology of the future.
No one has a better starting point than Norwegians to build on the salmon's success. We have the knowledge, the history, the infrastructure, the technology, and not least, the Norwegian salmon brand.
You can read more about how our ‘R&D’ programme will be applied by learning about our ‘Eco-Bubble Design’ principle and discover the life cycle of ‘Our Salmon’.