Aquaculture UK
On the
road
Fish Farmer catches up with Mike Sutherland, founder and CEO of Highland Aqua Team FF: When did you start Highland Aqua Team and where do you operate? MS: I started the company which was, and remains, very much a family business in 2010 with five people hand vaccinating salmon. Now we operate with 36 people throughout Scotland, Norway and the Mediterranean. Part of this growth has come from our net washing business, based in Muir of Ord, which currently washes over 500 nets per year. FF: In 2017 you ventured into machine vaccination. What was the driver for this? MS: Several reasons really. We recognised the high and consistent quality that machines can deliver, as well as the clear reduction in the risk to operators of self-injection. So, in the interests of both safety, as well as quality, we looked to see how machines might form part of our service. FF: How was that received by your customers? MS: At first, reluctantly. Our industry sometimes suffers from ‘first mover’ nervousness, given that the cost of getting things wrong is often pretty high. But recently we have seen a surge in interest as confidence is building with experience. FF: Traditionally, machine vaccination has necessitated plant and equipment being installed permanently in hatcheries. How does the Highland Aqua Team offering differ here? MS: We have invested in a mobile semi-automated device, the NFT 20, which has been designed and produced by Pharmaq Fishteq in Nesna, Norway. The machine is fully transportable and relatively light by industry standards.
recognises the size of each fish and adjusts the injection site accordingly, giving an accuracy of over 98 per cent. Software updates are communicated via the internet or via backup software which we always carry around with us.
FF: How have you adapted this technology for the Scottish industry? MS: Well, rather than carting the vaccination machine from site to site, we decided to make a fully self-contained mobile unit which can be driven from location to location, with no requirement for unloading. FF: Can you say a little more about how that works in practice? MS: Essentially, each mobile unit consists of an 18-tonne truck with a customised container on the back. In the container we have fixed two NFT 20s, an anaesthetising unit, as well as a holding tank. The inside of the container is lined with a ‘food safe’ lining, while the compressor is housed in a sound proof box. All the customer needs to supply is water, oxygen and electricity to power the machines. The machines operate in tandem in the container and together will vaccinate about 16,000 fish per hour. The visual intelligence software
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Top: Operators handling fish to be machine vaccinated. Above: Mobile unit inside which the equipment is housed. Opposite: Image analysis.
FF: When fish handling equipment is moved from site to site, health managers, quite reasonably, have concerns about biosecurity. What assurances can you give that this risk has been adequately addressed with your system? MS: We have thought about this and, of course, there is plenty of existing expertise in the industry on which we have been able to draw. Perhaps the leaders in this field are the Fish Vet Group and we asked them to come and assess our procedures. They swabbed various high-risk points before and after our disinfection process and were able to give us a clean bill of health on
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09/05/2018 15:56:55