SmartGeoFish webinar summary.
The first SmartGeoFish webinar was held with great interest on June 3, 2022, with the aim of presenting the main challenges and development opportunities of the aquaculture sector through Hungarian and international examples.
Among those present were the employees of the Ministry of Agriculture, the Institute of Agricultural Economics and the Managing Authority of the Hungarian Fisheries Operational Program (MAHOP).
Zsófia Kertész, representing Campden BRI Hungary Nonprofit Ltd., spoke about the potential of the SmartGeoFish and SmartAgriHubs cascade projects, which are necessary to improve the resource efficiency of the sector. She described the objectives of SmartAgriHubs (e.g. promoting the digitization of European industry and "connecting" different actors in each field) and then introduced the members of the consortium:
- Campden BRI – Digital Innovation Hub,
- Geofish Kft. – Hungarian African catfish producer and processer company,
- Seacon Europe Kft. – IoT expert.
Finally, she gave an overview of the objectives of the project, e.g. reducing water consumption and ensuring the transparency necessary to meet food safety and quality requirements.
The next speaker was Szilvia Mihálffy from the Federation of European Aquaculture producers, who presented the challenges of European fish farms in the light of the results of the FutureEUAqua project. The participants of the webinar received extensive information on the current situation and challenges of aquaculture, e.g. animal health challenges, rising prices and water pollution, in connection with which the rapporteur also spoke about the results of the FuturEUAqua project. The project aimed to effectively promote the sustainable growth of resilient, environmentally friendly, bio and traditional aquaculture to meet future challenges related to climate change and the growing consumer demand for high-quality, nutritious and responsibly produced food.
Dr. Dénes Gál, one of the founders of Geofish Ltd. gave his presentation entitled The Situation of the Hungarian Aquaculture from the Point of View of Geofish Ltd. After presenting the situation of European and domestic aquaculture, he also turned to the conditions related to African catfish production in Hungary. On the positive side, he mentioned the availability of thermal water, the high level of professional knowledge and the market, as well as the application system, which is of great help to the companies concerned, but stressed that the process is very slow. What really makes production in Hungary difficult, according to the expert, is the increase in the price and the scarcity of feed and energy, as well as the lack of the euro. He also mentioned as a negative the current dominance of environmentally unsustainable systems. The expert gave an insight into the Geofish system, which utilizes the run-off thermal water of horticulture in an environmentally friendly way with recirculation technology.
Valéria Tálai and László Dvorszky gave a presentation on behalf of Seacon Europe Ltd. László Dvorszky, IT consultant, presented Seacon Europe's cloud-based target software, the QST, which provides a solution for making the origin of food and the history of integration transparent along the slogan "farm to fork", based on the combination of IoT devices and mobile technologies, as well as the information generated by each actor. The system records the parameters that affect the quality of the product, allows the parameters to be compared with the limits of the relevant standards, i.e. the qualification, and also ensures full product identification and traceability. Valéria Tálai, software developer, presented Seacon's self-developed data-driven solution, an application based on cloud technology and IoT devices designed to support water management tasks. The task of the system is to receive the data from the sensor networks and devices installed on the site with the specified regularity, to store the resulting data in a database and to display them in standardized form in a way that is understandable to the users according to the specified level of authorization. In addition, it is possible to query and review the data in the form of reports.
You can find out more about the SmartGeoFish project on the following pages:
The event ended with answering the questions raised during the presentations.
