The farming of barramundi, also known as Asian seabass, has escalated substantially over the last decade, becoming a very important marine aquaculture species throughout the Asia Pacific region. Skretting anticipates that the production of barramundi, which is increasingly regarded as “the white salmon” due to its premium potential in the marketplace, will continue this strong growth trend and is committed to supporting its customers through precision services and premium feed solutions.
Utilizing the comprehensive portfolio of aquaculture species’ growth and feeding models that Skretting has built up over three decades, AquaSim is a unique suite of digital tools dedicated to facilitating precision farming. The latest addition to this platform is a new growth model for barramundi. Using rich data to calculate the expected farm performance, it also provides tailored feeding protocol recommendations to enable production enhancements. This new model is also suitable for the most advanced genetic barramundi strains.
“We worked with a large new production dataset of barramundi reared under a variety of environmental conditions both in net pens, tanks and ponds to develop this new model,” explained Kristoffer Tveit, Skretting’s Digital Innovation director. “The recent data was collected from Southeast Asia, Australia and the Middle East. In addition, we had our own growth data from nutritional research trials at the Skretting ARC Hezhoubei Research Station.”
“The growth model is now more robust for all growth predictions and clearly improved for large barramundi (>2 kg). Furthermore, it was interesting to see that small barramundi have a higher optimum temperature than large barramundi, which is something we have seen in other species,” said Tveit.
“I am very pleased with the new barramundi model,” said Arjen Roem, Skretting marketing manager South Asia. “Some growth models tend to be too theoretical in predicting maximum growth rates and are simply unachievable in practice, but our barramundi model is an industry-model. It sets realistic feed ration targets and it will predict growth accurately for the majority of our customers.”
The new model will be part of a new precision feeding and farming service for barramundi customers offered by Skretting in the Asia Pacific region.
