© Mowi Scotland
The record-breaking FCR was achieved at the farm, which is in Loch Linnhe, near Fort William, after the first cycle in which the site was partially fed remotely, in collaboration with information from the on-site farmers.
As Mowi Scotland point out in their newsletter, The Scoop, the achievement is can be put in perspective by the fact that terrestrial livestock, like cattle, have an FCR of around 8:1.
Salmon are far more efficient, as they’re cold blooded and don’t use up energy battling gravity, so Mowi’s typical FCR around 1.1–1.2. However, the new results show that the Gorsten salmon converted up to 99.8 percent of their feed into protein – which means each 5 kg salmon only ate 5 kg and 10 grams of food.
According to Mowi, this impressive result was achieved thanks in part to the work done by Mowi’s remote operations centre (ROC) – which supervises the feeding of 12 million salmon 18 of Mowi Scotland’s sites – and fed the site for 270 of the 465 days between the smolts being stocked on site and them being harvested.
Other factors that were flagged up by Mowi include constant data analysis, synchronised communication between the farm and ROC, the experience of Gorsten farm manager Scott Cameron on the ground – who’s been with Mowi for 38 years – and precision feeding from operators like Davie Horne in Fort William.
“It’s the Holy Grail of FCRs and I didn’t think it would ever be achieved. It was very unexpected at the end of the cycle,” Cameron revealed.
According to the manager, the result can be attributed to good feeding practices on site, good communications with the ROC, the experience of the ROC operators with the knowledge of the site and the local tides, and the attention to smaller details like the position of the feed delivery devices and the position of the cameras that monitor the fish while feeding is taking place.
