Australian salmon farmer, Huon Aquaculture, has transferred to the sea the biggest hatchery-grown salmon in the southern hemisphere. The salmon were in excess of 1kg, matching the size of a small proportion of salmon grown on-land by the world’s leading salmon companies based in Norway and the Faroe Islands.

David Mitchell, Huon Aquaculture’s Freshwater General Manager said that “Huon is setting a new benchmark for salmon farming in Tasmania. This has only been possible as a result of Huon’s new $43M Whale Point nursery – by growing the salmon on land to this size in larger tanks, we are significantly reducing the time the fish will spend at sea, further improving the company’s environmental performance allowing longer fallowing and improving biosecurity.”

The company said that the salmon have been on-grown at Whale Point for seven months which will result in a reduction of time spent at sea by between 30-40 percent from an average of 14 months, to 9 to 10 months.

Whale Point uses world-leading water recirculation technology that cleans and re-uses 98 to 99 percent of the freshwater in which the fish are grown. This enables the water to be reused repeatedly with the remaining one to two percent going to waste treatment. The nursery has zero discharge to the environment due to the collection and composting of the fish nutrients for use by farmers.