THE COMPLETE OPEN OCEAN FARMING PLATFORM

In the past year InnovaSea Systems, Inc.  has made significant strides to provide the marketplace with the complete open ocean farming platform.  Focusing on the major farming operations; stocking, feeding, treating, mortality removal, harvesting and data collection; the company has tested a variety of products in two separate oceanic conditions.  

Until recently forced air was used to deliver feed from the barge to the pen.  While air delivery is an efficient method for surface pens, it is inefficient and physically problematic when feeding fish in submerged pens.  Engineers at InnovaSea have developed a single point, arterial feeding system allowing a surface barge to deliver feed to multiple submerged fish pens.  Feeding is delivered in a timely manner with significantly less fines than traditional methods.  To evenly distribute the pellets in the pen a helical feed disperser (Figure 1) is mounted to the central spar.

Aquaculture is an industry of scale and managing costs.  InnovaSea has successfully more than doubled their pen volume recently.  Rapidly going from 6400 m³ to 7200 m³ to 8000 m³ and finally 14,500 m³, the company has been able to respond to the market's demand for larger pens.  All four pen sizes are being successfully farmed on commercial operations in Panama, Mexico and Hawaii.

InnovaSea has completed their initial trials on a submersible gravity pen named the Evolution Pen.  Loosely based on traditional surface pens, the Evolution Pen can easily submerge, ship in standard 40 foot containers, and scale up or down in volume with minimal design effort.  Designed for regions where there are aperiodic storms, the Evolution Pen will offer ease and security to farmers who do not need equipment designed for harsh open ocean conditions.

Lastly, InnovaSea has recently purchased Amirix, the producers of Real Time Aquaculture technology.  Farmers can now view in real time, key data such as salinity, temperature and dissolved oxygen.  Real Time Aquaculture transmits the data from the sensors to a central hub wirelessly.  This data is then transmitted to either a vessel nearby or a command station on shore.  Eliminating cables addresses the frequent problem of fatigue failure at the cable/sensor interface.