The innovation of traditional aquaculture industry: Opening a new century with intelligent fish farm management system

With the advancement of information technology, the patterns of Taiwan's aquaculture industry have changed from labor-intensive to technical-intensive and then gradually shifted to smart farming. Ever Spring Marine Aquaculture Co., Ltd has developed the 'Smart Aquaculture IoT Management Platform" and the "Smart Bird Repellent Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System" to improve the breeding efficiency and reduce the damage caused by the birds.

The established 'Smart Aquaculture IoT Management Platform' has four main functions, including fish pond management, report management, backstage management and access right management. The system equipped with sensors of water temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and pH value, recording aquaculture environment and water quality data automatically through IoT technology, while combining the intelligent analysis technology and automatic waterwheel control mechanism to monitor and control the environment of intelligent fish pond. It is estimated that the use of this system to replace artificial paper-and-pencil records can reduce the consumption of working hours by 15%. In addition, by monitoring the environment values of the fish ponds with the intelligent systems, the loss due to fish disease might be reduced by approximately 5%, which increases production capacity and value.

Furthermore, the 'Smart Bird Repellent Unmanned Aerial Vehicle System' was designed as an automatic inspections system that combined the technology of IoT and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle through cooperating with experts from National Pingtung University of Science and Technology. It not only saves the costs of labor and time but also mitigates the problem of damage caused by birds while it replaces the inhumanity solution such as killing birds. So Far, the system is expected to reduce the loss of damage by birds by 10%, while reducing 2% labor consumption for building bird-proof nets near the fish pond, which greatly increases productivity and enhances competitiveness.

With the assistance of the Smart Agriculture Project, the production of Ever Spring Marine Aquaculture Co., Ltd's could combine the information communication technology including IoT, unmanned vehicles and intelligent analysis to improve the informationization degree of aquaculture. The system could quickly combined with information, transforming the paperwork to electronic records, while it coverts the high labor demand works into semi-automatic work. The next year after the completion of the project, the intelligent analysis will be carried out with historical data, which will effectively facilitate the transformation of industry and reduce the human error with the traditional method of decision-making, moving towards the fully automated aquaculture industry.