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Aquaculture Innovation Centre
Singapore is rapidly ramping up local agriculture and aquaculture production capacity for food supply resilience and food security by 2030. Financial assistance schemes for farms, optimisation of land and sea space for intensive farming, providing infrastructure for urban farming and promotion of innovation and technology adoption in farms are some of the country’s plans towards achieving the ‘30 by 30’ goal - providing 30% of the total nutritional needs for local consumption. This is the reason Enterprise Singapore set up the Aquaculture Innovation Centre (AIC) in 2019.
AIC ’s key objective is to serve local aquaculture farms with their production needs through project consultancies, research in innovation and technology development, testing services for farm biosecurity management and manpower development. AIC is hosted by Temasek Polytechnic. Well-equipped with aquaculture facilities, AIC has since worked with local and overseas enterprises as well as farms in more than 65 projects since its inception. These also include training in responsible aquaculture practices, research in technology development and translation with institutes of higher learning and research agencies.
With the growing interest in getting into the aquaculture space pushed by the strong government support for developing an active industry, AIC has helped train aspiring aquaculture business minded individuals wanting to establish startups through a 6-month skill based “Entrepreneurship in Aquaculture” programme offered in 2020. A few startup companies were formed in areas of farming and support technology for aquaculture production. Being industry-centric, AIC has been actively supporting both Standard Development Organisation and Singapore Food Agency (SFA) as co-convenors in working with the aquaculture industry to develop a standard on responsible aquaculture practices, such as Singapore Standards 670:2021 and 689:2022. Since Aug 2021, a few local aquaculture farms have completed the training course in SS 670:2021 offered by AIC. Some have gone on to achieve successful farm auditing and GAqP certification by SFA.
As Singapore only has less than 1% arable land for agriculture and aquaculture and only 110 coastal and a few land-based aquaculture farms, intensification of aquaculture production on a small footprint based on the “Grow more with less” concept is a necessity to meet this ‘30 by 30’ goal. For aquaculture production to be sustainable under such high stocking densities, AIC has been offering testing services to farms for their farm biosecurity management; pathogen detection and identification, water and feed quality analyses, microbiological and blood profiling as well as histopathology and microbiome analysis for farms. A collaboration with the Nanyang Technological University in setting up an ISO/IEC 17025 - SACSINGLAS certified investigation laboratory is underway to further support farm aquaculture health and disease management. Apart from testing services, AIC has also developed a rapid on-site disease pathogen detection kit and an oral vaccine against iridovirus in grouper and seabass.
AIC’s commitment and dedication to the aquaculture industry goes beyond Singapore, especially for local companies with interest to go global. It provides technical assistance and technology transfer to farms setting up their production base overseas. With versatility and commitment demonstrated in striving to serve the aquaculture industry, AIC’s effort is revered with much recognition locally and regionally.
Singapore Pavilion, Booths #328 & #427 Email: aic@tp.edu.sg; ww.tp.edu.sg/aic
AIC’s indoor RAS, R&D farm and SGUS students with the AIC Team (SGUS is Singapore United Skills programme-a skill based training course for adult learners who were displaced due to the pandemic or are making mid career changes).
