One of the largest fish auctions in Europe, Visafslag Urk is the largest single marketplace for flatfish and also has the unique position of being almost a hundred kilometres from the sea.
Barend Hakvoort at Visafslag Urk said that the auction has been through the same hard times as the fleet it serves, and with an increasingly difficult situation for grading fish for auction, the decision was taken to set up a grading system. While that may sound a straightforward option, for Urk this needs to be something capable of a high rate of grading to cope with the sheer volume the auction deals with.
The grader is substantial construction that occupies part of the Urk auction floor. Practically the size of a small supermarket, it hasn’t yet reached its hoped-for 40 tonne/hour capacity but 25 tonnes has been reached and the system is still being perfected. The auction decided not to go to a single supplier, but instead custom-built its own grading system around a bank of a dozen Aweta weighing machines.
‘We’re expecting to get to thirty tonnes,’ Barend Hakvoort at Visafslag Urk said. ‘And this is only plaice. Other species are still graded by hand.’
The machine is very exact and the system is seen as a good one,’ he said, commenting that it is also fast, with fish spending less than half an hour between being taken out of boxes and graded into tubs with ice and water, so quality is better.
The system is manned by operators who place fish on conveyor belt slots to take them through the weighers that then route the weighed fish towards the right tubs, and the system as a whole is run by a single operator who manages settings and speeds from a tablet computer while walking around the machine.
‘In September 2014 the fish prices started to rise just as fuel was dropping fast in price, and we have a completely different situation today,’ Barend Hakvoort said. ‘Plaice prices have doubled over two years. There’s strong demand from processors and there isn’t a kilo of plaice anywhere in frozen storage,’ he said.
