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Laksesystemer and Agrilight announced a new strategic partnership in the landbased aquaculture industry. The Norwegian company Laksesystemer and Netherlands-based Agrilight are now entering into a closer collaboration on lighting for land-based farming with the development of a lighting concept for salmon breeding: the aim is to reduce the fish’s stress level, improve feed utilization and reduce energy consumption.
“Together with our partner Laksesystemer, we have developed a lighting concept for salmon breeding. This is a big step forward in the aquaculture market for us. We are grateful for the fruitful cooperation with the company during the development and testing in the past three years. We are ready to supply Laksesystemer and their customers in the landbased aquaculture with our new Agriled 3 aqua luminaires,” said from Agrilight.
A lot to learn
Agrilight is a company specialized in developing and producing lighting systems for livestock farming and has collaborated with Laksesystemer‘s parent company Fjøssystemer for more than 20 years. Laksesystemer and Agrilight are now entering into a closer collaboration on lighting for land-based farming.
“When we got to know Agrilight and their technology, we suddenly had access to a whole new world of knowledge about the use of light for the production of food,” said Ole Gabriel Kverneland, General Manager of Laksesystemer. According to him, they feel that they complement each other in such a good way that we now choose to formalize the collaboration.
“Norway is a world leader when it comes to technology to produce fish, but when it comes to knowledge about the use of light, I am sure that we have a lot to learn from both agriculture and the greenhouse industry in the rest of the world,” he says.
Testing lights for tilapia and snails
Obviously, most of the lights on the market have been developed for people, so light is often not adapted to fish. “Light for humans is in no way optimized for biological production or control of sexual maturation and the consequence is, among other things, that the fish are stressed unnecessarily and that the energy consumption becomes higher than it should have been. There are very few things that are as stressful for a fish as incorrect lighting, either in the form of flickering, poor dispersion of the light or incorrect intensity,” Kverneland explain.
For them, the key to the quality of the final product in food production is about making arrangements for the animals to thrive as well as possible. “Therefore, we are very happy to see that long-term testing on salmon smolt shows that we have achieved exactly what we thought we should be able to do; namely to reduce the stress level of the fish,” the General Manager said.
“According to Kverneland, they have received feedback from customers that “the tanks were perceived as easier to smoke with less stress response to fish and better light in the entire tank”.”
“This makes us confident that our theories agree with practice and that we really have a product that can help reduce stress. Although the light was initially developed for salmon, the initial results have been so interesting that we are already in the process of commercial testing both for tilapia and actually snails, with various research environments,” he said.
Next step in light for livestock
Laksesystemer is a young company established by Fjøssystemer – a leading supplier of technology to the agricultural industry in Norway with close to NOK 1 billion revenue.
Substantiated by synergies with Fjøssystemer, Laksesystemer offers a broad portfolio of solutions to the aquaculture industry. One of our most important is the concept “Smart feeding” consists of a range of innovative solutions tailored for modern land-based aquaculture that adds up to what we firmly believe to be the best feed system on the market.
“Agrilight is specialized in developing and producing lighting systems for livestock farming and has collaborated with Laksesystemer’s parent company Fjøssystemer for more than 20 years.”
Experience from lighting control for cows, chickens, pigs, goats, insects and greenhouses is now being used to create new solutions with specific characteristics for the production of fish.
For the company, this partnership is a next step in light for livestock and in contributing to the sustainable production of animal proteins in the future. The lights are produced in Agrilight’s own factory in the Netherlands.