Cflow improves fish welfare with gentle fish handling

When handled gently, fish experience less stress, which improves overall fish welfare. The result is lower mortality rates, less biomass loss and better resource utilisation. Moreover, good welfare helps the fish to resist bacteria, viruses and parasites such as sea lice, improving biosecurity.

Handling in both aquaculture and fisheries is a natural and necessary process. Live fish are crowded, pumped, sorted and transported during their life cycle. This enables better growth, health and resource utilisation, as well as protecting the surrounding environment.

However, handling is challenging for the fish. It may make them vulnerable to stress, disease and injury, resulting in lower yields and wasted natural resources. For the sake of fish welfare, handling should be kept to a minimum.

Cflow Fish Handling delivers complete handling systems for fisheries and aquaculture. Cflow’s many innovative components enable the gentle crowding, pumping, treatment, transport and cooling of live fish. Each system is unique, tailormade for the individual customer using state-of-the-art technology by an interdisciplinary team of biologists, engineers, field service engineers and cleaning system suppliers.

The Cflow solution includes systems for gentle loading and unloading, biomass calculation, and combined sorting and water separation. Advanced water technology treatment and automatic cleaning and disinfection are included as well. In addition, the Cflow control and management system compiles and presents data from various sources.

Two highlights are the Flowline 5™ valve, which reduces the risk of impact injuries to fish, and the Cflow compact processing plant, an emergency slaughter solution to avoid transporting and handling vulnerable fish.

A gentle touch is the hallmark of Cflow. The company draws upon its extensive in-house know-how and skilled network of subcontractors to develop optimal handling systems that ensure excellent fish welfare and biosecurity, while safeguarding hygiene and biosafety.

Cflow’s data systems provide decision support and enable effective monitoring of fish welfare, traceability, reporting, and more. This minimises risk along the entire value chain.

The complete Cflow solution reduces mortality, energy consumption, discharge of chemicals, pathogens and parasites, while yielding fish of the highest quality.

The demand for fish has increased by over 120 per cent since 1990, and this trend does not seem to be waning. Both fisheries and aquaculture have seen an increase in catch and production in recent decades, and global fish production is projected to rise to 204 million metric tons by 2030.

The aquaculture and fisheries industries are seeking ways to become more sustainable, and gentle fish handling has a crucial role to play in this.

With 30 years of experience, Cflow is one of the world’s leading developers of systems for live fish handling.