Aquafeed firm uses Microsoft’s AquaSim to help farmers optimise production
Skretting is the aquafeed division of animal nutrition company Nutreco. The aquafeed division alone manufactures nutritional products for more than 60 species of fish and shrimp, spans five continents and creates millions of servings of seafood every day.
Skretting has always focused on the future and looks at ways to optimise production for aqua farmers. In the past, advice would be given to farmers using spreadsheet algorithms. This was a long and complicated process, that would often result in inconsistencies. Skretting therefore looked at digitising feed forecast and analysis for farmers and started using Microsoft’s AquaSim as well as Microsoft Azure DevOps and Microsoft 365.
“AquaSim is a very tailored application that helps answer farmers’ questions about how much feed to order, when to harvest, and can even predict how fish and shrimp will perform in their specific environments,” said Torunn Landråk Kleivenes, Cloud Solution Manager at Skretting.
“The solution brings years of our knowledge and research to farmers’ fingertips. The application is hosted in Microsoft Azure and we use Microsoft Azure DevOps to build and deploy the application. Together, the AquaSim portal and Microsoft Teams are used to present information and collaborate with users, bringing actionable insights directly to farms around the world, faster.”
The Aquasim app allows the team at Skretting to input data such as temperature or size of fish to create predictive reports with up to date feeding recommendations.
“The advantage of Microsoft cloud services is that everyone has access to the same information no matter where they are,” says Kristoffer Tveit, Digital Innovation Director at Skretting. “We use Teams and other Microsoft tools to remain unified and collaborative around the globe.”
“Some of our customers in Latin America have used actionable insights provided via the AquaSim solution to change the feeding schedule of their shrimp ponds to realise a 30 per cent increase in productivity, which is huge,” added Tveit. “Without the underlying Microsoft technology, those insights would have been time-consuming and difficult to uncover.”
“Aquaculture is a relatively young industry where we embrace change. That’s reflected in how we use Microsoft 365 and Azure cloud solutions to digitise and automate feed forecasting for farmers, one of many major leaps forward in how we help aqua farmers grow their product.” Tveit continued.
