1. Chile Report: Salmon Farming

Gilbert Vergères | February 12, 2019

This time, we visited the operations of Salmones Camanchaca during our trip to Chile.

We started our trip in Puerto Montt. The city is about 1000 km south of Santiago. It represents the heart of the salmon farming operations in Chile.

We looked at the hatchery, grow out sites, and the value added production facility.

Image Tanks

Salmones Camanchaca have faced a hard hit in 2015, when a volcano outbreak had covered the Hatchery in Petrohue in a one meter high layer of ash.

The hatchery was almost destroyed, but since then, everything has been rebuilt.

We visited a new hatchery. It was designed for using Recirculating Aquaculture System (RAS). It allows the company Salmones Camanchaca to produce 12 million smolts each year.

We asked them why they are rebuilding the hatchery at the same place, since there is risk of a new outbreak. The answer was simple; there are more than 2000 Volcanos in Chile. It does not really matter where you are, access to fresh water is more important.

Image Farm Site Team

Back in Santiago, we had the chance to experience a somewhat unusual experience for people visiting from Europe.

Saturday evening around 22:30 hours an earthquake happened. At the time, we were in our hotel rooms. The experience was a bit scary.

Everything started to shake for around 30 seconds. The earthquake was measured at 6.7 using the Richter magnitude of an earthquake. Annually, about 100 of this strong type of earthquakes are being registered worldwide.

Once we saw that this did not seem to scare the locals too much and that people were back on the streets, we also decided to go out.

After having been out on the town, we went back to our rooms but had difficulty falling asleep. We were a bit frightened and our stomachs felt queasy.

When reflecting on this event the following days, we both felt a lot of respect for the locals and the way they handled this situation.

Image View of the Ocean

What is your opinion? Join the conversation

We were once again very impressed with what was shown to the Bonafide team in Chile. The new hatchery impressed us most, the value added plant with the new fast lines for producing finished products was also great to see.

But what we are most interested in is to hear from you:

Do you know how much progress the Chilean farming sector has made in the last decade?
What do you know about great fish farm infrastructure?
Have you ever taste-tested Salmon from different countries at the same time?
Could you taste or smell any difference?

Comments