Greater discussion to be had as to the merits of it all at the moment whilst fish meal is the staple of farmed stuff. The farmers love to quote growth conversion of 1.2:1 but reality is wet weight feed equiv equates to feed conversion of >10:1. Bluefin convert feed to weight very poorly. Plenty of R&D in soy based feeds etc but not there yet.
I posted this a couple of years ago elsewhere. Still relevent imo. Plenty of risk but plenty of control vs marine based farming where you truly are just another farmer.
I think the major challenge lies within the successful marketing of its product, which due to the growing system engaged has a reasonably high production cost. It needs to maintain a high margin but may find this challenging in light of significant increased barra production coming online from seafarm operations (most particularly Marine Harvest - Northern Territory) in Australia which will almost certainly be targeting niche markets in the US and Europe. It will also face competition from other "white" flesh fish either grown or wild caught and be subject to the in favour/out of favour sentiment that is prevalent across the seafood spectrum. I expect that there is not and will not be any published pricing for it sales as this would be seen as commercially sensitive information.
Intensive tank aquaculture has great advantages over net/pen oceanic/estuarine aquaculture insofar as optimum growing conditions can be manipulated and maintained at all times - this can be in terms of water temperature, oxygen levels, salinity, photoperiod, feeding optimisation, disease and parasite control etc.
Conversely however on the risk side system failures can have catostrophic consequences but undoubtedly this oraganisation with have all the necessary risk management strategies in place in order to mitigate such a system failure. Similar technology is used world wide, it must be remembered, in one way or another for the production of Atlantic salmon and species of trout (amongst others) in their hatcheries.
The Tasmanian Salmon industry hatchery is in fact state of the art technology which I suspect would be not unlike the growout facility utilised by AAQ, and whilst most stock produced through it are grown to only 100g prior to stocking to sea cages its system would produce greater than 500 tonnes of biomass throughput per year. I have seen fish held in this facility of a size greater than 400g therefore clearly believe AAQ can technically achieve its production goals - provided no short cuts are taken.
It is a capital intensive business which they are into and unfortunately probably are not any scale economies to be found once at full production. Increased capacity over and above the 300t will require significant capital. Margin improvements will be found as improvements to diet are made (only in early stages of development for this species)and the best mix of the variables - diet, water temp, salinity, oxygen level and photoperiod are discovered.
For you info and my opinion only.
AAQ Price at posting:
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