Pristine
Waters
Equals
Pristine
Fish
“We Must Leave The Environment In The Same Or Better Shape Than When We Began.”
—Alf-Gøran Knutsen / Kvarøy Arctic / CEO
The water off Kvarøy belongs to the people of Norway. Official standards must be met. But we have even more stringent standards of our own. We stopped using copper in our nets over 20 years ago. Our pens are fallowed 3 times longer than required. We farm for 16 months and allow the water to be undisturbed for 6 to 8 months – by choice.
First To Use Blockchain For Transparency
Food buyers and their customers want to know where their food comes from, how it’s raised, and what’s in it – especially seafood. As the first in our industry to utilize blockchain technology, we’re promoting access to pure, unaltered data collected directly from the source to allow people to buy what they truly want.
Symbiotic Vs.
Antibiotics
It’s a face only a salmon farmer could love. Behold, the lumpsucker! These beautifully industrious fish have a symbiotic relationship to our salmon. Lumpsuckers enjoy eating sea lice off of other fish, which means our salmon are naturally lice-free. “People said it was impossible, that it was too cold up north to use fish to eat sea lice. But our lumpsuckers have been a great success, addressing a tremendous challenge. We’re searching for innovative ways to become better all the time.”
– Håvard Olsen / Kvarøy Arctic / Operations Manager
Nature’s
Car Wash
Our lumpsuckers have their own kelp bed – also a Kvarøy Arctic invention – where they can feel at home inside the pen. The salmon know just what to do. They swim up to the kelp, get picked over by the lumpsuckers, and swim off, sea lice-free. It’s like a car wash for salmon.
Cleaner Feed For Healthier Fish
Of all our efforts, perhaps none is as impactful as our insistence to develop cleaner, healthier, more environmentally responsible feed.
With Biomar, we invested in developing a new feed using the trimmings from processed North Atlantic wild fish caught in Marine Stewardship Council Certified fisheries which are then cleaned to dramatically reduce PCBs and other environmental contaminants. The result? Salmon that is 339 times cleaner than the FDA specification of 2 parts per million with about 1/9th the PCBs found in other farmed salmon.
discoverseafood.world/kvaroy-salmon
“It Hasn’t Always Been Good Business To Be More Sustainable – Taking On More Costs For Feed Which Is 50% Of The Total Production Costs. But We Do It Anyway Because The Fish Are Only As Good As The Food They Eat.”
—Gjermund Olsen / Kvaroy Arctic / Production Manager
Kvarøy Arctic Is A Net Producer Of Fish Protein
The Fish In / Fish Out ratio represents how many fish used for fish oil and fish meal it takes to produce a farmed salmon. We wanted to improve upon the industry gold standard of 1:1, the equivalent of using one wild fish as feed to raise one farmed fish. Sustainability to us meant more than “a wash.” With changes to our feed that includes the use of microalgae, our FIFO ratio is 0.48:1, meaning we use less than half a fish to produce a full grown, healthy Kvarøy Arctic salmon.
Most innovation in our industry has been in processing. By putting the same energies against feed research and development, Kvarøy Arctic’s journey to sustainability continues to move the entire industry forward.