Arctic char, Manitoba zest

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This article was published 06/08/2024 (447 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Expectations are heating up at a Manitoba cold-water fish farm.

About 30 per cent of the 14 acres worth of buildings to be constructed for the massive Sapphire Springs facility north of Winnipeg has been completed and the first batch of inch-long, month-old Arctic char fry (baby fish to be raised as broodstock) has moved in.

In the next couple of years, they will be joined by tens of thousands more fishy friends as the locally-owned enterprise builds out more than 600,000 square feet of production tanks for its planned full-fledged commercial commissioning in early 2027.

The facility, expected to employ about 100 people, is designed to produce 60,000, 1.7-kilogram fish per week, or approximately 5,000 metric tonnes per year.

Sapphire Springs partners believe it will still only be a drop in the bucket of the global food market that currently “survives” on 8,000 tonnes per year of the cold-water fish that features meat deemed more delicate than salmon. Its taste is generally described as somewhere between trout and salmon.

Located at the former site of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans’ Rockwood Experimental Fish Hatchery, more than 30 kilometres north of the provincial capital, the hope is Sapphire Springs will contribute to a popularization of the niche member of the salmonidae family.

The Manitoba business has already become well known in the very small international Arctic char industry. A delegation of officials from Iceland, home to 75 per cent of sector production, visited the facility this week.

“Competition is not a threat, it’s a good thing,” Gudrun Hafsteinsdottir, Iceland’s minister of justice and honorary guest at the recent Icelandic Festival of Manitoba, said of Sapphire Springs.

“There are lots of possibilities to work together and to share knowledge. I hope my visit here and our co-operation will be beneficial for both parties.”

Chuck LaFlèche, Sapphire Springs chief financial officer and one of a group of investors behind the $190-million project, said the idea is to grow the market.

With Arctic char representing only about one per cent of the salmon market, he said everyone concerned believes there will be no problem absorbing more supply. “We’ve already had one of the largest seafood distributors in North America tell us they would like to be able to distribute our entire production.”

Sapphire Springs is designing its facility to be as sustainable as possible, officials said, with 99 per cent of the water sourced from a local aquifer cleaned and recycled throughout the facility. The form of land-based aquaculture called a recirculating aquaculture system, pioneered at Rockwood in the 1970s and ’80s, promises the water is returned to the tanks cleaner than it was before.

LaFlèche said about 90 per cent of Sapphire Springs’ financing is effectively in place.

There’s $15 million of partner equity, plans to raise $10 million through the province’s Small Business Venture Capital Tax Credit program (with close to $4 million already spoken for) and plans for another $20 million in equity from three or four sources. He said the final touches are being made on a $125-million debt consortium being assembled by New York-based investment bankers.

Last fall, Sapphire Springs acquired an Arctic char fish farm operation (Icy Waters Ltd.) in Whitehorse that uses a similar stock and sells eggs to producers across Europe. The former operations manager of that enterprise, Doug Hotson, has moved to Manitoba to take on a similar same role at Sapphire Springs.

Hotson said the Rockwood aquifer creates excellent conditions for Arctic char. “The broodstock want the water to be 6.5 degrees (C), which is exactly the temperature of the water when it comes out of the ground, all day, every day,” he said.

It takes about 18 months for the char to get to the desired 1.7-kg size to go to market. The last nine months of growing requires water temperature of about 11 C to 12 C, which is reached naturally via transient heat from the equipment and normal heat generated by the fish eating and swimming about.

“It is a game-changer for us when it comes to operational costs,” Hotson said. “We’ll have 1.1 million litres of water in circulation. If you had to heat and/or cool that, it would be a substantial expense.”

Hafsteinsdottir said there are currently four large fish farms under construction in Iceland that could increase its annual Arctic char production to 40,000 tonnes.

LaFlèche said Sapphire Springs is already eyeballing plans to build additional capacity elsewhere in Canada that would increase its annual future production to 35,000 tonnes.

“But that’s still only five per cent of the salmon market,” he said. “There is so much room in the market … I don’t get stressed about competition and neither do the Icelanders. We both just see it as strengthening the market.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca