The Project
The iFishIENCi EU funded project is bringing together 16 partners in a trans-disciplinary effort towards making genuine improvements to fish farming worldwide. Fish aquaculture is essential for providing healthy food to a growing world population, but its success depends upon our ability to find more sustainable farming practices. This means more effective ways of monitoring fish-health and welfare, as well as more efficient ways of feeding fish that reduce pressure upon the source of fish-feed ingredients, such as agricultural crops and wild-caught fish for fishmeal and oil. The ambition of iFishIENCi is developing and demonstrating disruptive IoT/AI based innovations, considering the feeding value chain as a whole, and addressing four commercially-important species, with fish quality as focus.
Through close collaborations between engineers and fish biologists, the smart feeding and monitoring systems will be more elaborate and precise. We will identify new value chains for the valorisation of specific waste (dirty water, sludge) from different production systems, leading to zero-waste target and value creation. We will also demonstrate how strain selection and smart breeding can support optimizing the feeding efficiency for alternative feeds in African catfish where cheap and sustainable feed ingredients would be essential to ensure the growth of EU production and fulfil the protein needs of the developing countries.