Field Trip to Frøya

Hi there!! My class and I got to go on a super fun field trip to the beautiful and aquaculture-rich, Frøya!

It was a bright and early start and we boarded the ferry from Trondheim to Hitra. It took about 1.5 hours and it was so beautiful! A couple of my classmates had never been on a boat before and most of them had never been on a boat that moved so quickly so it was silly to listen to all their excitement!!

In Hitra we met Hans, a guide at the maritime museum who gets to drive a really cool boat and show tourists a salmon farm. We got suited up and hopped in the boat to go see the cages! The farm is owned by Lerøy, which is one of the bigger salmon producers in the country. We got to see their net pens, their automated feeding barge, and we toured their slaughtery.

It was so fun bopping around on the RIB and seeing how high-tech the industry is here. Their feeding barge, for example, is managed at another (on-land) facility where a technician basically sits behind a wall full of computer screens, has all of the calculations of exactly how much feed should be delivered based on the size of the fish, the temperature, the salinity, the time of day and the amount of daylight. Then they simply press a button and feed is sent through tubes from the feed barge to each cage and the feed is sprinkled evenly across the surface. Then they have multiple cameras in each net pen to be able to see the fish eating and they can make sure that everything is looking okay and the fish are no less or more hungry than their models predicted. The amount of feed distributed is then put back into calculations and the model can output exactly when the cage will be ready for harvest based on the feed conversion and growth rate. How cool is that!!?

The slaughtery was also insanely high-tech and cool to see (however, also a bit morbid). At Lerøy, they use well-boats to pick up all the fish from their cage and transport them to their final destination. Then the fish themselves go for one last swim into a holding tank in the slaughtery where the fish starts being cooled. The salmon is then put onto the first conveyor belt where machines electrically stun then stab the fish and a human cuts the gills again to ensure that the fish is dead. Then the fish is bled for about an hour and its body is completely cooled. This part was the saddest part of the day and I don't think I did it justice to explain how much thought has been put into the slaughter for it to be as humane and painless for the fish as possible. The rest is the system is very automated and computer-based and each fish is photographed, weighed, deemed a quality, and then can be further processed into fillets or whole fish. Fun fact! Norway will only export their fish that are “superior” quality so if at the grocery store you see “Norwegian salmon”, you know that’s our good stuff.

The slaughtery has just about everything figured out. Next door is the box-producing company, they have houses for their truck drivers to stay in while they wait for their truck to be packed, the fish is never frozen but remains at 0°C the entire time, and they have screens in each production hall to show them the rate and capacity at which the plant is functioning and at that rate, what time they’ll be done for the day.

After our cool tours, we headed back to the Hitra terminal and hopped on the bus to go to Sistranda on the island of Frøya. The bus took about 1.5 hours and the scenery was so nice! We even went through not 1 but 2 tunnels that go under the fjord!

We made it to Sistranda and we were greeted by Thomas and a rep from the municipality who told us all about the aquaculture industry and how it’s booming in Frøya. The city is all brand new, and everything is paid for by the aquaculture industry. Fun fact! This place is the island with the most millionaires and billionaires in Norway. All thanks to the salmon.

We wrapped up our day walking around the modern neighbourhoods and had some fish soup for dinner. We had a drink in the upstairs bar and watched the sun (kind of) set. (We’ve gotten to the point in the year where it is never fully dark and my circadian rhythm is out of whack).

Our next morning started early too and we woke up in our apartments to head back over to the Blue Competence Centre. We started the day with another visit to a fish farm, this time co-operated by a high school. It’s actually really cool that here the schools, the industry, and the government are very closely linked and support and develop each other. This school has a route for students interested in aquaculture where a couple of times a week they’ll work at the farm and learn the skills that the industry will actually want by the time the students are looking for a job. So we had 16-year-olds driving us around on the boats and telling us all about the farms. I felt old.

The rest of the day was spent hearing from cool companies related to aquaculture.

We met a biologist from Måsøval, the farm we toured this morning but she told us about the modelling that she’s building for fish growth and optimizing each site's maximum allowable biomass.

We met two scientists from Frøy, a company offering high-tech solutions and ships for all your aquaculture needs. They have ships specifically designed for different de-licing methods, net pen cleaning, transporting fish, just about anything you could need. They also have really cool robots that clean the nets as well as divers, cranes, sensors and a bunch of cool technology.

We met Akerblå, a consulting company that offered services from veterinarians to engineers. We talked a lot about fish health and biosecurity and this was super cool!

We had some lunch and got on a bus to drive the 3 hours back to Trondheim!! The drive was so pretty and of course, there were some pretty cool tunnels too. This field trip was so cool and it felt really good to actually see what is happening, what’s working and some of the problems aquaculture is facing here!! I had a blast!!