Averøy Seafood submitted an application for permission to establish a land-based salmon farm in Tøfta, Western Norway. The site will have an annual production of 30,000 tonnes.
This is according to documents that SalmonBusiness has been given access to.
According to Averøy Seafood, the closed compartments will be placed in a land-based artificial pool, carved into a mountains. The facility will take 70g smolts and produce salmon fish up to the harvest size of around five kilograms.
“The facility consists of up to 28 20,000 m³ closed compartments where each compartment constitutes its own infectious unit, a total of 560,000 m³ and a converted annual production of 30,000 tonnes of fish. Two parallel compartments will be placed in a pool carved out in mountains that are about 450m long, about 85m wide and 35m deep, which implies a pool volume of approximately 1.34 million m³ of seawater,” Averøy Seafood wrote in its recent licence application.
In each cage, 306,000 smolt will be released, which will need around eleven months to grow to harvest weight. Only seawater will be used in production.
According to the documents, Averøy Seafood has signed memorandums of understanding with the waste operator Ragn-Sells Havbruk, processor Sekkingstad and the fish health company STIM.
Serial entrepreneur Geir Nordahl-Pedersen is behind the Averøy Seafood project. He also wants to establish land-based salmon farming at Losna in Solund municipality, but after being granted permission by Vestland County Council, the Directorate of Fisheries withdrew its licence last summer. This is because they were in doubt whether the facility was actually land-based. Losna Seafood has appealed the decision.
