The fish and animal feed additives company Adisseo — which is a subsidiary of the chemicals giant China National BlueStar — has opened up its new aquaculture R&D center in Singapore.
In a statement sent to AFN, executives from the company said that the freshly-launched ASA — the Aquaculture Station by Adisseo, to use its full name — will focus on nutrition, aquatic animal health, and aquatic science technologies.
Located within the Singapore Food Agency’s (SFA) Marine Aquaculture Centre (MAC) on St John’s Island, ASA is well positioned to plug into SFA’s tropical aquaculture research. It will also be granted access to biological materials available at MAC to facilitate its own aquaculture research. The team at ASA say they are keen on cultivating other research partnerships across the region as well.
“This is a big development: It blows the old image of St John’s Island as a laid back campsite right out the water,” said AgFunder investor Angela Tay, describing her recent tour of the site.
“Only 9% of fish consumed in Singapore right now are caught or grown locally,” said Tay. “So the opening of a centre like this is a clear sign of the Singapore government’s ambitions to scale back that food dependency. A cornerstone of this strategy is about drawing in international companies to catalyze the local ecosystem. That can help Singapore quite a lot in its bid to style itself as an aquaculture innovation epicentre for the Asia-Pac region.”
With the growing global population and the need for more well-balanced animal proteins, aquaculture is set to play a key role. Yet the growth of aquaculture relies on the supply of optimized feeds at all life stages for all species. A sustainable development of aquaculture relies on the physiological well-being, health, growth and reproductive success of the different species of fish and shrimp reared under varied environmental conditions. Solid nutrition and health research will be essential to ensure that aquaculture concretely contributes to the UN’s sustainable development goals.
A shift also will need to happen here from unreliable and obsolete farming practices to fully-controlled and bio secure systems that mimic agricultural and livestock models. With its new fully integrated Recirculation Aquaculture System (RAS) dedicated for research, Adisseo aims to transform and improve farm management with monitoring tools powered by AI and IOT.
These sorts of versatile technologies will need to be combined with a systematic use of data to provide real time monitoring, according to Adisseo’s head of R&D Aquaculture, David Bal. “With this state-of-the-art research facility allowing full control of water parameters, we can better understand important factors like stress, nutritional deficiencies and the impact of diseases on animal performance and mortality,” said Bal. “Farm technology and artificial intelligence can greatly improve yields and the development of new tools will grow continuously to support farmers and feed mills.”
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