As part of its continuous search to deliver the best nutritional solutions with tailored services to each customer, Salmofood created the Success Farm Index (SFI), an economic performance index that is now available for the Chilean salmon farming industry.
“It is a very innovative index that aims to put metrics and assess all the productive KPI’s of the salmon industry. Today, there are multiple indicators from the production point of view but the ranking is not unique and the information may change according to each index,” said Ernesto Passalacqua, commercial manager of Vitapro Chile.
When evaluating salmon farm performance from a productive and economic point of view, one of the most important points are feeds and the reduction of production costs. To measure this performance, it is necessary to have at least one index that can rescue the economic dimension of production.
“Currently, there are standard indexes used by companies to measure their particular performance that use the trend behavior of the industry. These indicators basically incorporate productive information to generate a set of indexes and obtain a ranking. Although it constitutes an input of value for companies, it does not measure the economic component that allows having a specific vision of the cost that, in some way, reflects the level of competitiveness of a particular company in the macro context of the industry,” Passalacqua stressed.
In this context, Salmofood developed a performance indicator (SFI) that explicitly includes the economic dimension. Thus, the SFI encompasses four fundamental dimensions: fixed costs, costs associated with animal health, feed associated costs and smolt costs.
SFI can be compared to the most used index in the industry. There may be consistency between the two indexes, but discrepancies can also be observed. For example, the standard industry index can rank a production cycle within the percentile of the best productive results, while the SFI can classify them as average and even as poor. These discrepancies reflect the importance of making the economic dimension of the production process explicit. Salmofood stated that this new dimension, the economic one, provides a more robust interpretation of the production cycles and business performance, based on trends in the industry.
“We greatly value the contribution that Salmofood makes to the industry with the SFI. Since it considers the economic performance, it allows a more accurate analysis and makes the cost structure explicit within each of the four dimensions considered in the SFI. Thus, we can define which factors within each dimension are the most relevant to explain the average cost, which allows us to design actions to reduce those costs,” said Manuel Cabezas, food manager at Ventisqueros.
Salmofood features PatagonIA, a tool that, through artificial intelligence and machine learning, predicts the productive behavior of a farm with initial parameters, such as diet, number of fish, initial weight, projected mortality and farm location, among others.
