Marine Donut is stocked with first batch of SalMar salmon

"The atmosphere was one of joy, emotion, and relief as we witnessed the fish stocking of the Marine Donut at Sekken off the coast of Molde on Friday afternoon. In brilliant sunshine, the wellboat arrived with thousands of 2.5 kg salmon."

So announced Bluegreen Group, the company behind the Marine Donut design, in an online statement as the facility is at last stocked with fish.

The Marine Donut, a floating closed containment system for fish farming, is designed to solve some of the salmon farming industry's most serious problems, by preventing sea lice infections and fish escapes, in addition to eliminating pollution by capturing feed residues and fish sludge.

The project, which was originally slated for use by Mowi, was taken over by SalMar in 2019. Last July, the Marine Donut was towed 510 nautical miles to its new home in the Romsdal Fjord in preparation for stocking. The facility is approved for 1100 MTB, which equals 1100 tons of biomass, equivalent to 200,000 market-sized fish or 1 million post-smolts.

Now, almost a year later, the first stocking of the facility has taken place, with a test batch of 15,000 fish. The three project leaders, Bluegreen CEO and inventor of the Marine Donut concept Nils-Johan Tufte, Project Manager Geir Andresen, and HSEQ and HR manager Elg Thunes were present on-site to witness the event.

"It has been a long journey, with ups and downs over many years," said Tufte.

"It was a major milestone when SalMar bought the first facility, and when the fantastic Bluegreen team built it last year. It's just fantastic to see happy salmon swimming around in Marine Donut," he added.

The Marine Donut is now being handed over to the control of SalMar, whose operations manager at the facility is Erlend Are Larsen, Bluegreen Group confirmed.

"In the first instance, SalMar released 15,000 salmon, weighing around 2.5 kg," says Andresen. "If all goes according to plan, they will release the remaining amount of fish so that there will be 200,000 salmon in the facility," said Andresen.

"The fish are calm and distributed well in the facility. Everything has been successful so far," he added.

Now that the first Marine Donut has been stocked in Norway, Tufte says he expects more orders to come in for similar facilities elsewhere.

"We have received incredible attention over the past year, and many fish farmers are interested. Both here in Norway, in Canada, Scotland, the Faroe Islands, and Chile," Tufte said.

"But everyone has wanted to wait to see how the fish thrive in the facility before signing. We believe there will be a new order soon," he added, noting that the company is looking to hire further technical staff to support future orders.