3/8/2007 - Profit from fish farming made deep inside the rock

Profit from fish farming made deep inside the rock

NORWAY
Friday, August 03, 2007, 23:50 (GMT + 9)


Deep inside the hard granite rock, below mountains rising more than 1,000-metre up from the fiord, there is a small tunnell going in to the mountains. Inside the tunnel there is a wide large hall. Though it appears to have been made as a shelter for protection against a nuclear war, it was actually constructed there for farming of fish by the company Norsk Fjellfisk.

Tyssedal is a village built around the metallurgic industry served by hydroelectric power from the more than 2,000-millimetre annual rain fall on the mountain plateau above. The town is nestled in the Sørfjorden fiord on the west coast three hours from the City of Bergen.

The old industrialised village is not where one would expect an aquaculture venture to exist, but in 1997 a local entrepreneur saw the possibility of using heated water from the metallurgic plant, combined with clean waters from the mountain plateau to farm fish.

In the harsh Norwegian climate it is near to impossible to operate a land-based, fresh water, fish farm in the outdoors. The cost of heating water would be enormous, and it would be cheaper to build a hall outside in the open. But a hall needs lots of maintenance, and also needs to be heated, whereas inside the mountain the temperature is stable and maintenance on the “building structure” is nonexistent.

In a country where salmon farming was increasing fast, and hundreds of ventures had gone bust during the early times of production, did not leave leave many believing that the trout venture would succeed: too expensive, too small, and no market. There were many arguments, and they were correct in one thing: the farm went bust.

But new investors came, and today it is the only such farm not just surviving. but also beginning to thrive. Last year they posted a 10 per cent operating profit. The new owners, Hardanger Fjellfisk AS have proven that farming of brown trout inside a mountain can be a good business.

“We have good clean water. The heated water from the metallurgical plants we buy at a cost, which gives us much lower energy cost than if we were buying any other energy,” says farm manager Ove Kambestad. He has been managing the farm since the beginning, and has not lost faith in the project.

“We are doing this alone. There are some other land based farms raising mainly rainbow trout for a production of “rakfisk,” a product in which the fishgoes through a kind of fermentations process. Our fish is now distributed all over the country, from Oslo to Bergen. It is sold via fishmongers, fish displays at supermarkets, and it is widely available in restaurants,” explains Kambestad.

It is early morning, around 4.30 am when Fis.com arrives at the farm, while Kambestad and a colleague are transferring trout from circular tanks to large square tanks with oxygenated water. The trout is transported to a slaughterhouse 80 kilometres away, not an ideal way to go about. New solutions are being discussed to save cost and time.

Now the slaughtering of fish takes place one or two times a week in the modern facilities. If there was a slaughtering facility close to the farm could the slaughtering take place any day during the week.

We are slaughtering all through the year. We have different generations of trout making it possible to harvest the increase in biomass continuously”, tells Kambestad. He is adding that the farm has a total production volume of 1,100 cubic meters. Total time from the trout larvae’s starting to feed, until the fish is ready for harvest with a size of around 5-800 gram, is 18 months.

The biological feed conversion factor is impressive at 0.89, when it started at 1.1 to 1.2 in the initital stage. The current feed factor is better than most Norwegian salmon farms. True, there is a difference between land-based farming and farming in cages in open water, because if feed is fed to salmon and not eaten it tends to sink down and go through the net in the cage. However, feed given to the trout at Hardanger Fjellfisk ,when not consumed, sinks down and lays at the bottom of the cage before being drained out, and the trout has not been feeding much on the feed that sinks down to the bottom of the cage.

Skretting AS, a Nutreco subsidiary, produces the feed used at the farm, and they have developed a special slow sinking formula with the right nutrients for this fish.

“For us Skretting AS has been a very good partner. Not only have they developed feed formula just for our farm. They have also been a very good adviser helping us whenever we have had any problems”, says Kambestad.

There is no real forum were Kambestad can discuss issues regarding farming of trout. Salmon farmers can have their association, and a large number of different venues, exhibitions, conferences meetings where they are meeting to discuss issues of interest. For Kambestad the contact is, as with the rest of the aquaculture industry, really just kept up by dialling the phone number of Skretting.

There are many land-based farms in Europe producing trout, mostly rainbow variety, and a few producing brown trout. Kambestad does not like to compare the quality of the fish with the quality obtained in other European farms.

The fish produced at Hardanger Fjellfisk has its genetic origin from a famous fast growing stock in the Tunhovd Lake. Not only is this stock quick to develop, it also produces very high quality fish. Coupled with the fact that the feed has a content of 80-milligram astaxanthin per kilo, it is easy to understand the difference.

Most brown trout produced anywhere in the world is white in flesh. Hardanger Fjellfisk is using high content of astaxanthin to produce fish with a deep red colour. Norwegian customers will not eat any salmonid fish if the flesh is not a nice and deep red. This is because both the wild salmon and the sought after trout living in the mountains have this deeply red coloured meat.

The annual production is now around 75,000– 80,000 kilos. Last year the company posted an operating profit of around EUR 120,000, against a loss of EUR 23,000 the year before. Hard work and persistence has proven that it is possible to make money deep inside the mountains of a Norwegian fiord.

By Terje Engoe
www.fis.com

Photos: T. Engoe