Optimising the Quality of our Seafood Harvest
This is a pet subject for me, as I find it incredible that the inherent quality in a beautiful portion of seafood is contingent on 25,000–100,000+ hours of growing time — for farming this involves considerable care, feeding and husbandry, and for a wild harvest it can be years of evading predators leading to the skilful capture by a fisher. Therefore, we should aim to protect and appreciate our amazing seafood and the fantastic taste and health benefits it provides.
The incredible fact is that many harvests are poorly managed, such that the quality, and therefore yield is not optimised, and in some cases, this can lead to a net negative financial result. Harvesting is the critical first stage of fish processing and we now understand much better how vitally important this process is for yield and final product quality. The investment in catching or growing the fish up to harvest is considerable and the penalties for getting it wrong during harvest are significant. On top of seeking good professional advice and continual assessment of KPI’s for harvest performance, personnel training is needed to continually improve the performance of harvest systems. This is where data capture is vital, and the decentralised blockchain based Fishcoin ecosystem has been designed by Eachmile Technologies to incentivize producers and downstream stakeholders to record and utilise this data to help optimise seafood quality at the consumer end of supply chains.
I have personally advised many fish farming operations but most of my experience has come from the champagne end of the aquaculture industry, being salmon farming, which at 2 million tonnes pa represents a small portion of global aquaculture production of approximately 90 million tonnes. The advantage of this experience is that it also evolved from very basic practices to relatively sophisticated harvest systems operating today that can serve as models and guiding principles for the harvests of the vast majority of seafood producers (~90%) being small-scale operators. When I was working in the salmon industry in the early 2000’s, the feed efficiency was the prime focus, as this is where the majority of the cost is in salmon farming, so that makes good sense. However, this appeared to take the focus off of the harvesting process. In fact, there was, and is still often, a disconnect between the farming operation and the processing operation at the harvesting point, which leads to confusion over responsibility and consequent poor management. This is despite the impressive diligence and work undertaken in freshwater and seawater for the previous 2.5–3 years to get the fish to the point of harvest. The result was then, in many cases, in that final hour, the harvesting process was compromised, and yield, fish welfare and quality (inextricably linked) suffered as a result. Ironically, this often led to the product making a loss on the market due to downgrading.
I found this a compelling area of research coming from the tuna wild capture/sea ranching industry where quality is so important for the highly discriminating Japanese sashimi market. This propelled me to investigate best practice from terrestrial agriculture industries to see if harvest technology might be transferable. The outcome was the implementation of a project group involving a multitude of engineers and seafood technologists and fish farmers working together to develop a percussive stunning harvest system that focussed on fish welfare. This system produced by Seafood Innovations (now owned by Baader) was the eventual winner of the prestigious Alastair Mews RSPCA award in 2002 recognising the innovation as the most significant welfare development for all animal production industries in the UK. It is still the major harvest method used today and other welfare/quality focussed harvest techniques have also developed (Ace Aquatec’s electrostun harvest system won the innovation award at AquaNor 2017), recognising the critical importance of this process to substantially increase the quality and yield of farmed salmon.
There are a vast array of different harvesting and processing methods used for our seafood (see below a few examples) and it is important that this step is managed well to reduce waste and optimise the yield and quality of our precious seafood resource.
