AKVAsmart, together with the Nutreco companies Marine Harvest and Skretting in Norway, is establishing the world’s largest pilot salmon and trout farm to test aquafeeds in commercial conditions.


Operating as the Centre for Aquaculture Competence (C.A.C.), it is intended to help modern fish farming achieve even better results. The first research fish were transferred to the sea cages April 30 at C.A.C.’s Langavik location, north of Stavanger, South-west Norway.


C.A.C. will provide a tool modern fish farming has lacked – a farm where researchers can test feeds, feeding and technology under completely realistic, commercial production conditions.


”The difference between serving dinner for five and five hundred is more than multiplication: much research may be required to take research results from controlled experiments and scale them up to commercial conditions. We can now work across disciplines to release an efficiency potential that we know exists,” said Tor André Giskegjerde, Managing Director of C.A.C..



Giskegjerde has been educated in fish nutrition and is an expert in fish feed. He has long experience as a researcher at Nutreco Aquaculture Research Centre and as Product Manager at Skretting in Norway. In the last two years he has worked on feeding technology at AKVAsmart.


The three owners, AKVAsmart, Marine Harvest and Skretting, represent technology, fish farming and feed. The National Institute for Nutrition and Seafood Research (NIFES), the Norwegian Veterinary Institute, Norwegian College of Veterinary Medicine, Stavanger Regional College and the environmental foundation Bellona are permanent business partners of C.A.C..


C.A.C. will be expanded to three fish farming licences, three times the size of a small commercial farm. Equipped with the most modern feed and feeding control equipment, it will develop and document new solutions in areas such as food safety, nutrition, feeding technology, fish health and environmental monitoring.


”One of the biggest challenges in fish farming is to give the fish the optimum quantity of feed without having any waste. When you have around 100,000 fish in a cage with a circumference of 100m, precision feeding becomes a science. We need to develop this science further and we need realistic conditions in which to do that,” said Giskegjerde.





C.A.C. will be used as a training centre where fish farmers can acquire the latest competence. Colleges and universities will also be given the opportunity to use the farm.
There will be a clear emphasis on environmental objectives at C.A.C., both in its own production and in the competence it develops and conveys. The nets at the farm will be free of copper, wrasse will be used on a large scale to combat lice and new measures to prevent fish from escaping will have top priority.