C-Shrimp

Over the last decade, the interest in aquaculture and related activities in Flanders has strongly increased both among companies and the government. An issue that hampers the further scaling up to commercial sites is the high production costs and the increasing pressure on local resources (water, space and raw materials).

This is the starting point for the C-Shrimp project partners, who aim to produce larger volumes of seafood on smaller surfaces at a competitive market price. Moreover, they aim to use sustainable cultivation principles.

The general objective of the project is to develop an indoor cultivation concept for shrimp that does not require water changes and produces virtually no waste. The new concept is based on improved clear water technology, which enables intensive shrimp farming.

At the same time, the footprint will be reduced by recycling waste into a product that improves the health of the shrimp. To this end, C-shrimp will:

• Build a new experimental facility that will serve as a starting platform to develop all tools.
• Add a module to cultivate microalgae removing nitrate from the system.
• Develop a new filtration system to remove significantly more solid sludge from the RAS system for shrimp.
• Develop a new fermentation process to convert the waste of the shrimp into shrimp farm feed.
• Develop a specific shrimp diet that has immunostimulatory effects and contains less fish and soy meal.

This project is essential to enable the expansion of contract research by IMAQUA in Flanders. If this new cultivation concept can be commercialised successfully in the future, this will mean a breakthrough for the European fish, crustacean and shellfish production and improve the competition with imported products. The developed technologies will also be relevant to scale up hatchery and nursery installations.

Blue Cluster’s C-Shrimp project was recognised as a cluster project within the Flemish bio-economy policy plan, which is financed with funds from the ‘Flemish Resilience’ recovery plan. Through these funds, the Flemish government gives an extra impetus by supporting cluster projects between the research world and various private sectors that fall within one or more of the topics defined in the bio-economy policy plan.