ACUITOPÍA

Ilustración: Susón Aguilera

Last December WUR presented
its model to implement a policy based on FAIR data. Some of the most
interesting concepts, which I cite below, can be perfectly applied to the
aquaculture field.

“The future is digital for food systems, farming
systems, health and the environment. These areas are increasingly driven by
data and high tech innovations using new technologies, sensors, robotics and
artificial intelligence.”

New aqua technologies plays a
crucial role in enabling this digital transformation. In the coming years, crucial
goals will be developing Artificial Intelligence and big data analytic
algorithms for aquaculture, designing innovative fair field data
infrastructures that operate across scientific disciplines. Such
achievements drive technical developments for different aspects related with
aquaculture, like individually tailored feed adapted, personalised fish health;
improve genetics, new food products, and the efficient monitoring for the
anticipation of the effect of climate and environmental changes.

To cover all the parties
involved in the aquaculture value chain and generate innovative proposals, open
innovation models emerge as a powerful and necessary tool that allows achieving
a complete and immediate integration of the different agents that generate
disruptive knowledge. At the same time, it contributes to the agile
incorporation on the productive sector, since many of the proposed solutions
are born precisely from the needs of the industry. Around the world, and of
course in Europe, they are starting to incorporate very active models, which
identify a new generation of start-ups, related to the agri-food sector and
specifically aquaculture, which seek to cover the «Technology Transfer
Gap», that exists between academia and industry.

Such as the case of Alimentos Venture, platform
to accelerate start-ups to develop innovation in aquaculture feed and
technology. Aqua-Spark is a
global investment fund that makes investments in sustainable aquaculture
businesses. Lab Tech4Climate
select projects that want to go beyond economic profitability, seeking to have
a positive impact on our society through the improvement of the environment,
favoring sustainability, quality of life and healthy environments.

Aquanetix, AquaManager, Aquatracker, SmartWaterPlanet… they are
platforms that offer integrated solutions for aquaculture management,
integrating smart IT and fish farming innovations. In fact, SmartWaterPlanet is
the platform on which the European MedAID
project is working to go one step further and allow aquaculture companies
to compare their results on line.

In addition, examples of
start-ups that are offering their solutions to the aquaculture industry, like Cageeye for monitoring of fish
behaviour and optimization of food cycles. Calysta
sustainable and innovative feed for fish and livestock. Smalle Technologies that offers
products to measure a series of parameters in real time and with a high
frequency. Libelium actually one
of the emergent examples of developing IoT solution for monitoring the
water quality and life conditions for salmon. Bluephage commercialises kits for the
analysis of viral indicators that allow increasing the health security of the
product, both water and food or the industrial process that is controlled. Entomo transformation of
by-products and waste of the agro-food industry using insects. In addition,
one of the most interesting and disturbing Finless
Food produce seafood without having to farm or harvest live fish.

Moreover, many others that
we have in a digitization database for the agri-food sector, many of them
incredible … until recently.

Sometimes, this gap, coming
from the university itself or research centres, and in other occasions because
of the emergence of small innovative companies outside the academic world. The
above examples are high-tech start-up, which come from different sectors,
sometimes from very different industrial activities, offering solutions
applicable to the challenges identified in the sector as essential needs for
the improvement of competitiveness.

What I said earlier «
The future is digital for food systems & aquaculture”.