The NIWA Aquaculture and Biotechnology Centre takes full advantage of our world class facilities and staff at several locations around New Zealand.
They have extensive knowledge and practical experience of scientific issues and the broader planning issues relating to marine farming.
NIWA can help businesses ranging from small farms in sheltered coastal waters through to large, offshore proposals.
Broodstock: As a farmer your primary needs are broadly to optimise the performance of your stocks and maximise profitability. Optimising stock husbandry, feed management and ensuring you have well trained staff will take you part of the way to ensuring you have an efficiently operating and profitable business.
Fish Health: Management of fish health is crucial to the future success of our aqauculture industry. NIWA has established a disease unit at our Greta Point (Wellington) site to safely contain and study fish diseases.
Farm Design & Management: NIWA can work with commercial clients to design and manage marine finfish operations. From site location, farm design through to feeds management, disease identification, prevention and treatment, handling and harvesting.
Assessment of Environmental Effects, Modelling of impacts and Impact mitigation:
NIWA has proven expertise in the assessment and modelling of environmental effects of marine farm operations. This is coupled to NIWA’s world renowned expertise under our Centres for Aquatic Biodiversity & Biosecurity, Climate, Coasts, and Oceans.
Recirculation System Design: NIWA can deliver the system requirements and specifications of seawater recirculation systems tailored to the needs or commercial clients for a range of marine species such as paua, finfish and eels.
Training: NIWA first started training in paua farming courses in the 1980’s and ran courses for over 10 years, supporting the industry in its early years. Many of today’s paua farmers learned the basics from those courses. The new course includes updated material, including discussion of the use of new technologies such as recirculating seawater systems.
Feed Trials: NIWA’s Bream Bay Aquaculture Park houses a state-of-the-art nutrition trials unit for evaluating fish feed formulations and presentations.
