Discover the personal journey of The Rokter’s founder, Mikkel Pedersen, from his early days as a salmon research assistant to becoming a visionary entrepreneur dedicated to revolutionizing the salmon farming industry. This post delves into his passion for sustainable aquaculture, the challenges he faced, and the motivation behind starting Probotic to improve the welfare and efficiency of fish farming.
In the world of aquaculture, understanding the WHY behind one’s mission is crucial. For Mikkel Pedersen, also known as The Rokter, this journey began with a childhood passion for fishing and evolved into a relentless drive to revolutionize salmon farming. With a deep commitment to sustainable food production, Mikkel has navigated through numerous challenges, from the rivers of Northern Norway to founding Probotic. This post explores his story, the inspiration behind his endeavors, and the vision that propels him forward.
Over the past year, I’ve been on a mission to learn new skills to build and scale my vision-driven business Probotic. I’ve read countless books and talked to experts and business owners all over. And hopefully, during this time, I have gained some knowledge. Yet, despite spending hundreds of hours trying to learn business skills, I feel like I don’t know shit! – and, surprisingly, I love it!
However, trying hard to learn, some things have stuck. Besides learning to build systems and processes for everything in the businesses and try to make them self-sustained, it is the word WHY that holds magic powers for me. And that’s WHY I know that stating, «-I don’t know shit,» can be truly powerful because this allows me to take down my guard and ask all the stupid questions no one else asks. -and that’s when innovation happens.
Making everyone understand the WHY in a process is critical to scaling sustainably, and building a solid understanding of WHY is what I think will bring the most value to my own future successes. That’s WHY I’m writing this post – to clarify my drive and motivation for myself, my current and future employees, my partners today and tomorrow, and of course, all other røkters and fish farmers I work with and plan to work with in the future.
WHY passion for salmon farming?
For me, the passion started when I was a kid. All my life, my father and grandfather took me fishing all over Northern Norway, and I got completely obsessed. They had to catch me in from the rivers just so I would eat something. The obsession was sometimes unstoppable, and I used all my energy to understand the prey to be better suited to catch them. – Now, I think that I may have boosted my primal instincts and built a rewarding system where my brain give me high doses of dopamine every time I am on «the hunt,» regardless if it is fishing for salmon or hunting birds in the mountains.
Now in retrospect, learning from a young age fishing and hunting may be the one thing that has turned my brain to get a sort of extra drive, maybe also in business. This «hunt» addiction has transformed my thinking and make me always try to think ahead and imagine many scenarios autonomously. It may also be why I developed a strong passion and became a visionary. -or it may all be coincidences; who the fuck knows; -right?
But let’s jump back to the WHY Salmon farming; this was not intended to be a post about «the hunt» and dopamine drives, but maybe later I will write about that 😉
My salmon WHY started in my mid-twenties when I worked as a salmon research assistant. For many summers, I spent hundreds of hours underwater in snorkeling gear, floating down rivers in Northern Norway, counting wild salmon and harpooning any escaped farmed salmon we encountered. We also did all kinds of biological projects regarding wild salmon. Truly a time of my life that taught me a lot, even though I didn’t understand the value I was building before years later.
The unique thing about counting salmon was that I interacted closely with the salmon in their habitat over a long period of time in a vide variation of situations.
- Let me translate this into a salmon farming language; I experienced hundreds and hundreds of hours studying how salmon react to critical environmental data, where I felt It all on my own body while observing and studying the salmon behavior.
How did salmon respond to - cold water, -hot water, -sunny days, -rainy days, -muddy water, -clear water, -high currents, -low currents, -deep water, -shallow water, -wide spaces, -narrow spaces, -salinity-mixtures sones where the rivers meet the ocean, and zones where visibility disappears completely, shadows, and sounds, all in different mixes and variations. All a dynamic mixture of various data, all experienced thru hundreds and hundreds of hours being submerged underwater with the salmon.
This is today the data all fish farmers use to tune the feeding and take decisions on their production. Feeding is today done thru monitoring the salmon behavior on a screen from a feeding-camera, - I have been that camera!
The questions all fish farmers ask; -How will the salmon react to the coming conditions? and how should we plan for it?
In the years I counted salmon, I continued to stack knowledge and skills about salmon biology, but gradually I was more and more attracted towards learning more about technology.
From Research to Salmon Farming
After my years working every summer as a research assistant with salmon, I started working in the fish farming industry, more specifically on a service vessel. I got this job by a connection from the military where I was in active duty as a commander in a Rapid Reaction Force in the Norwegian Marine Department. My background and tasks for the military is something Is with me and help me stear a lot of my thought processes and action-making, so my military background is invaluable for me.
I had some experience from salmon farming earlier on when I went to «the fisheries school» in Lofoten Islands. -here, I had fish biology as a subject, and we had weekly practices on a fish farm. So I actually have dissected a lot of salmon and gone thru all the organs and especially concentrating on the transformation when anadrome fish goes thru smoltification. during my years in Lofoten I actually also got work after school on the salmon slaughter, where we manually stood in line and slaughtered the fish. -Its so cool to now seeing the exact same tasks being done purely by machines in the new factories! -Im sidetracking again so let me jump back…
– So I started working with fish farming at a service company, where we specialized in inspecting and cleaning fish pen nets. Again, Now the job was to spend a tremendous amount of time underwater observing the net around the salmon, but now behind a screen, steering robots are doing operational services. This time I saw how the salmon reacted in the pens under all kinds of various operations. I quickly saw that the same behaviors applied to the farmed salmon as the wild ones in the rivers. It was interesting to see how the farmed salmon in huge numbers did precisely as I predicted when something changed, like when it started to rain or if a predator bird entered the fish pen. During this time of my life operating robots and filming inside fish pens, I felt I could do more, but I still didn’t know exactly what...
The Salmon Escape
A normal operation in fish farming was to de-lize salmon. Under this operations we used a lot of various methods to remove salmon-lize from the stocks.
Under one of these operations, I sadly experienced a delizing operation going completely wrong, leading to an enormous salmon escape accident, where thousands of salmon fled. -This sat a profound mark in me.
Seeing thousands of escaped farmed salmon jumping around in that fjord, swimming towards the rivers with wild salmon, made me feel guilty. Guilty for not doing more and guilty for the rivers I knew may face hardships with the escaped salmon coming. Being part of this salmon escape accident was heartbreaking and set a profound mark on me. Whenever I think about it, I still feel guilty. I ask myself, could I have done more, could I have stretched out and sad stop, and may that had avoided the whole thing? -I will never know. But these questions today drives me to contribute as much as possible to prevent it from ever happening again, and I genuinely don’t want anyone else to feel the same as I did back under that escape.
In retrospect when analysing the whole thing I believe the reason was that the whole operation was so pressed on time where we needed to be done super-fast to get-going to the next de-lizing. I don’t think this episode would have happened today. The industry now have a lot more robust systems and procedures applied in the industry. But that episode still strongly motivates me to build systems and products to prevent salmon escapes in the future.
The Big Step
After years of inspecting and cleaning fish pen nets, I finally connected enough of the dots and I understood I could provide more value elsewhere. I understood that stacking all this knowledge I had invested time in could have more value elsewhere than what I offered to the Service company I worked for. In 2017 I decided to resign and took the most significant step in my career; I started my own business. (this section actually can be an entire blog post cause I probably did everything you possibly can do wrong, but somehow I still managed to get going) Also, a massive reason for quitting my job and starting a business was pure frustration with the technical solutions we used for the net cleaning and inspection operations, where I saw tremendous improvement potential. I also was bored to death by the nature of operator job itself; sitting for hours doing repetitive work seemed to be something everyone could do with some training, even a robot could do it 😉
- And for sure, it was hard to see that our cleaning and inspection operations negatively affected the salmon. And especially, the net cleaning we saw had a lot of adverse effects -the processes with high-pressure cleaning stressed the salmon, and the wastewater got sucket into the salmon gills.-not something you wish for when you produce food, Right?
Also if the cleaning where neglected, the salmon got a suboptimal environment with less clean water flushing through. So the cleaning operation had a loop of negative spiral effects on the salmon. So I started with the idea to develop a robot that just keept the nets clean all the time, like a robotic vacuum cleaner for the net pens.
Fast forward -Today
Luckily today, I have learned a lot more and built a better understanding; I also have grown a VISION where I firmly believe that fish farming is one of the answers to our global crisis our planet faces, where a growing population needs more food. (I will write a lot more about the reasons later in my blog) And I’m getting continually more excited to be part of what I believe is the solution. My ambitions continue to grow as I continue stacking on my knowledge and my newborn understanding that value is created by just giving back to others; -it’s no magic.
I know my way forward is to continue learning more skills about salmon production and utilize them to generate value and turn them into healthier and safer salmon. But It’s not just about providing safe and healthy salmon for the salmon itself or the consumers; it’s about feeding a growing population. And it’s about ethics, our responsibility to do what we can for our fellow species—in this case the salmon, and the importance of spending our time where it matters the most. I have most skills around salmon, so this is where I can contribute the most. -and doing just that is important for me!
The Rokter
The Rokter is the name of my personal investment and consulting company, overseeing my portfolio companies and projects. The name Rokter is my variant of the Norwegian word, «røkter»; a name for a fish farmer. The Rokter is involved in multiple companies I am proud to be part of today. And I am honored to learn from the incredible teams in my companies, customers and partners who are passionate about creating positive change in the world.
The greatest heroes is for me all the "røkters" that work tirelessly every day to feed our population with healthy and sustainable food from our ocean.
I am working now on manifesting my goals and vision over to others to speed up the improvements for the salmon farming industry and bring it to the next level, providing safer and healthier salmon and promoting a more sustainable future for everyone.
In conclusion, maximizing and sharing skills with as many others as possible is my drive and fuel, and have becoming my new «hunt,» and this is what I will continue to concentrate my time and efforts on for the upcoming years. Hopefully, I soon get to a point where we see some payoff in turn of solutions and products that actually improve the days for fish farmers and the salmon; at least, I will try my best to deliver on that.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read my first-ever «personal» blog post.
I hope you will understand better what drives me, WHY safe and healthy salmon farming matters to me, and WHY it also should matter to you. -If not, stay tuned, and I am sure you will get there in some of my next blog post 😉
Have a great day to you all 😀
What drives a visionary entrepreneur to revolutionize the salmon farming industry, and how does his journey inspire sustainable innovation?
Conclusion:
Understanding the WHY behind a mission is what fuels innovation and drives success. For me, it’s about combining my love for fishing, my expertise in salmon biology, and my commitment to sustainability to create lasting change in the aquaculture industry. I’m excited to continue this journey, to learn, grow, and contribute to a future where salmon farming is not just a source of food but a force for good.
References:
- Norwegian Institute of Marine Research. (2023). The Impact of Fish Escapes on Wild Salmon Populations.
- FAO. (2022). Sustainable Aquaculture: Trends and Challenges.
- Nofima. (2023). Advancements in Aquaculture Technology for Sustainable Production.
- Probotic. (2023). Autonomous Underwater Drones for Fish Farm Inspection and Cleaning.
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