Creative Salmon Streamlines and Improves Operations with Innovasea’s BiomassPro™

Based on the west coast of British Columbia’s iconic Vancouver Island, Creative Salmon is North America’s largest supplier of Pacific Chinook (King) salmon. Founded in 1990, it was the first salmon farming company in North America to achieve the Canadian Organic Aquaculture Standard certification.

When Creative Salmon needed to improve its slow and cumbersome biomass estimation process, Innovasea was there to provide its AI-powered BiomassPro solution, which estimates the size and weight of fish stocks in real time with 99.7 percent accuracy.

Challenge

Chinook salmon are notoriously skittish and easily stressed, making hand counting dangerous to the fish. So for the last 25 years Creative Salmon has used a biomass estimation solution that featured bulky, suitcase-sized cameras and rudimentary software. While providing accurate data, the equipment was hard to move and the solution required manual data entry that was tedious and time-consuming.

“It was quite labor intensive,” says Barb Cannon, biology and operations director at Creative Salmon. “We had to look at each image that had been captured, determine if it was a decent image and, if it was, there was a sizing tool within the software where you’d have to manually estimate the size of the fish.”

The outdated system was also starting to experience mechanical problems and software glitches, prompting Creative Salmon to explore new options.

Innovasea BiomassPro camera

Solution

A long-time customer of Innovasea’s precision aquaculture solutions, Creative Salmon made the switch to Innovasea’s BiomassPro platform, an AI-powered solution that instantly estimates the size and weight of fish stocks.

BiomassPro features compact, stereoscopic cameras embedded with machine learning technology to take thousands of images of fish each hour and provide estimates of the biomass in each pen.

The solution enables farm operators to optimize production and reduce feeding costs. It also provides accurate growth projections to improve resource planning and sales forecasting – and ultimately boost revenues.

Result

• BiomassPro has saved countless hours of work and enables Creative Salmon to do more frequent biomass checks than the biannual estimates it did with the previous system.
• The size of a roll of paper towels, the AI-powered cameras are easy to move from pen to pen and can be handled by a single employee, saving time and effort on-site.
• A comparison of estimates from BiomassPro with Creative Salmon’s actual harvest data showed the system to be 99.7 percent accurate.