BI & Analytics in Aquaculture

By Matthew Leary, CIO, Tassal Operations

Matthew Leary, CIO, Tassal Operations

Aquaculture is one of the worlds fasting growing sources of protein. It is increasingly becoming an alternative to traditional land-based sources of meat. It is also an essential component in preventing over-fishing of wild fish stocks, with about 50 percent of all seafood consumed globally now sourced from aquaculture.

The company I work for, Tassal Group, is Australia’s largest salmon producer. Our salmon farms are all located in Tasmania due to the colder waters being well-suited for salmon. More recently we have also started growing prawns at farms in Queensland and northern New South Wales.

Technology plays a crucial part in how we farm both our salmon and prawns. We are a fully vertically integrated aquaculture business that produces literally from egg to plate. As such, we have IT systems in place to track the lifecycle from egg to harvest, and for tracking products from our processing facilities through our supply chain to our customers. We have adopted technology that means we have environmental sensors and high definition cameras— both below and above water—in key areas throughout our farming operations. This provides a far greater level of management control to optimize growth and yield efficiency.

All of this technology generates a lot of data, so it is crucial that we have a way to collect, organize, and present this data so that it can be used to drive better decisions. This is where BI helps.

Like many organizations, our BI foundation is our data warehouse. We currently have a traditional star-schema data warehouse that pulls data from our many disparate systems to provide a unified way to view information all the way along our value chain. We primarily present this data to the business using data visualization software; however, we also use OLAP cubes in some cases. We have found data visualization as a great way to drive BI adoption and engagement.

As Fish Farming Practices Mature, the Challenge to Continue to find Improvements in the Efficiency of Feed Conversion and Yields will Rely Heavily on the Application of Cutting Edge Techniques

A lot of the BI solutions that we have developed are similar to what you might find in many other businesses, such as sales, financial, inventory management, safety, and HR. The analytics around growing fish and then maintaining the traceability through the supply chain are quite unique. The more advanced data techniques we have been able to apply to this problem have been crucial in underpinning our drive to world’s best practice fish husbandry and production. We continue to try to innovate in this space.

With the advent of large-scale sensor deployments around our farming operations, we are now starting to work with cloud-based data platforms to enable real-time data analysis. This new way of managing our data is important in dealing with the increasing volume of data we are beginning to collect. Cloud provides an advantage in both enabling better data integration as well as the ability to leverage new tools that can be applied to solving problems.

Data and analytics will play a crucial rule in the future expansion of the aquaculture industry. As fish farming practices mature, the challenge to continue to find improvements in the efficiency of feed conversion and yields will rely heavily on the application of cutting edge techniques including machine vision learning and data science-based solutions.