A Creative Movement

By James Mullinger
Photographs by Jeff Lively
Art by Geoff Slater

Some of the most interesting innovations begin not with an answer, but with somebody asking a different question.

Visual artist Geoff Slater and CEO Joel Halse framed by the opening of the SmoothMove.

In the case of East Coast Innovation, a New Brunswick company developing technology for the international aquaculture industry, that question was deceptively simple: what if we stopped designing fish-handling equipment primarily around the people operating it and started designing it around the fish?

It sounds obvious once somebody says it. It was anything but.

Engineer Joel Halse had spent a decade working in aquaculture around the world, deploying new technologies and developing solutions involving everything from pumping systems to treatment technology, before founding East Coast Innovation (ECI) shortly before the pandemic. Through those years, one particular problem had become increasingly difficult for him to ignore.

Throughout the life cycle of farmed salmon, fish need to be moved. They may be transferred for treatment, health management or eventually harvesting, and conventional processes can require large populations to be crowded towards pumping equipment. Whatever sophisticated technology awaits them downstream, Halse saw the same potential problem occurring first: a pre-stress event simply getting the fish there. 

“If you could get rid of that,” he remembers thinking, “what would that mean to all of the downstream systems that we rely on to farm salmon?”

It is a question with implications considerably larger than the piece of machinery involved. Aquaculture has become fundamental to the way the world eats. The industry now supplies 59 per cent of global seafood, compared with just 5.5 per cent in the 1970s. Here at home, Atlantic Canada’s salmon and trout farming sector employs more than 9,400 people and generates $3.2 billion in total economic output, according to analysis by RIAS Inc. based on 2024 Statistics Canada data. More than 1,400 Atlantic Canadian businesses supply goods and services to the sector, generating over $600 million in annual sales, while the region’s farms produce the equivalent of more than 356 million meals annually.

In other words, making one part of this enormous system work better can have consequences far beyond the farm.

The problem was relatively easy to identify. Solving it was another matter.

Halse began reimagining the point at which the fish meets the equipment. Instead of asking how machinery could become better at moving salmon, he wondered whether the behaviour of the salmon itself could become part of the solution.

“There’s got to be some way that they would come to us,” he says. “They’d participate. If you could get it so that the biology would help us instead of us trying to do something they didn’t like.”

That deceptively radical idea became the foundation of SmoothMove, ECI’s patent-pending fish-loading technology, and the beginning of a six-year research and development journey encompassing New Brunswick, Grand Manan, Scotland, Denmark and Norway.

It required Halse and his team to forget, temporarily at least, the human experience of the world.

A salmon does not live on the two-dimensional plane humans instinctively understand. It is suspended within a three-dimensional environment, sensing the water surrounding its entire body and responding to currents, temperature, oxygen, light, colour, shape, movement and countless other signals.

“You’re coming up against phenomena to which there is not a negotiation, but only curiosity and discovery,” says Halse. “We don’t get to dictate the terms here.”

That meant watching.

Geoff Slater's art illustrates the six year evolution of the SoothMove from a traditional stainless steel funnel to today's purpose-built fish loading device

Cameras were introduced underwater. Sensors measured oxygen, temperature and other environmental conditions that a fish can sense instinctively but a human observer cannot. Water movement was simulated digitally. Designs were created virtually, modelled and refined before new apparatus was manufactured and presented to fish. Responses were observed, data collected and the cycle began again.

Colour, light, shape and flow were all explored. At the Huntsman Marine Science Centre in St. Andrews, the team conducted controlled testing to understand how fish responded to different visual environments. Some responses were surprisingly pronounced. Colour was not an aesthetic afterthought; it could materially change the way fish behaved around an object.

“You are talking about observation,” says Halse. “You are talking about having the freedom to look at everything from a perspective where everything and anything is possible. You’re not nearly as constrained by how things should be, but simply by observing what is.”

And that is where an artist entered the story.

Geoff Slater is one of New Brunswick’s most distinctive visual artists, best known for his continuous-line paintings and interpretations of the landscapes and seascapes surrounding his home province. His work has appeared at monumental scale in communities across New Brunswick, but Halse was interested in something beyond Slater’s ability to create beautiful images.

The two sat down at a kitchen table. Within five minutes, Halse had decided they should work together.

His next task was explaining to the people helping fund engineering research why he was adding an artist to the project.

“It’s not difficult to understand when you’re dealing with light and colour and shapes,” Halse says now.

Slater, however, believes the collaboration worked because the creative thinking was already there.

“Joel, right from the beginning, set ECI up like an artist would set up a studio,” he says. “There was this environment right from the inception of ECI of creativity. All of his conversations are creative. Joel thinks like an artist.”

CEO Joel Halse in his 10,000 square foot manufacturing facility in St. George, NB

Slater describes Halse as the painter of a much larger canvas, surrounded by engineers, scientists, fabricators and specialists who become different tools available to him as the work evolves. Adding a visual artist simply brought another tool into the studio.

The relationship also created tension, in the best possible sense.

Engineers naturally seek definition. Problems must eventually become measurable, repeatable and solvable. Artists are generally more comfortable with ambiguity. Halse would try to narrow a problem towards a solution; Slater would push it open again, questioning whether they were looking in the right direction in the first place.

“It’s the breath of innovation,” says Slater. “It’s this push and pull from the big idea, the zoom out, to the refinement of it to actually make it work. That’s the innovation breathing.”

Or, as he puts it a moment later: “We can make innovation breathe.”

The collaboration has changed both men. Halse laughs that after three years surrounded by engineers, Slater now casually uses words such as “modular”. Slater, meanwhile, has reached a rather pleasing conclusion of his own: “It’s nice to know that engineers are artists too.”

There is another symmetry to Slater’s involvement. His roots are in farming. Agricultural engineering runs through his family, but he left that world to become an artist. Decades later, art has unexpectedly brought him back into food production.

“Farming is maybe the most important thing we do as human beings,” he says. “That’s why we can exist as artists, because we’re so good at farming.”

What has struck him most during the SmoothMove journey is the seriousness with which the people he has encountered in Canada, Scotland and Norway approach that responsibility. Farmers, vessel crews, scientists, engineers and early adopters may work with different equipment and systems, but Slater has seen a common desire to do the job better.

“There are people existing out there doing things at a very high level and making things better for humanity,” he says. “To have an opportunity to make positive impacts on our farming systems has been very rewarding.”

It has not always felt rewarding.

Innovation rarely unfolds as neatly as it appears in retrospect. Halse and Slater have spent years travelling, testing, failing, refining and trying again. They have been cold, wet, tired and far from home. New equipment does not always make its inventor the most popular person on a working vessel. Early adopters are putting their own operations on the line when they agree to try something unfamiliar.

In between those trials, Halse and Slater ride mountain bikes through the New Brunswick woods, sometimes, by Halse’s own admission, “yelling at the trees” as they argue through problems that would matter to almost nobody else on earth.

Then came Norway.

Joel Halse checks the installation of the SmoothMove on a Norwegian harvest vessel

About a year ago, SmoothMove was being introduced aboard a major harvest vessel. Slater was cage-side for one of the first attempts to use it successfully in a commercial farming environment.

It did not simply go into the water and work.

Settings needed calibrating. Adjustments were made. Time passed. Slater remembers standing among the vessel operators worrying that patience might run out before they found the answer.

Then they found it.

“It went from trying to find the settings to hitting the settings and everything working perfectly,” he recalls. “That environment in the cage just went to a perfect state.”

The fish were moving, but with so little disturbance at the surface that the farmers working on the cages left their positions and went up onto the bridge to see the underwater camera feed for themselves.

“We all were literally just going, ‘Wow, nobody’s ever seen this before.’”

The farmers remained on the bridge watching.

“They just stood there with their mouths agape,” Slater remembers. “There might have been tears shed.”

For all the emotion of that moment, the numbers now provide their own evidence. SmoothMove has moved more than six million fish, representing approximately 35 million kilograms, and has completed months of continuous commercial operation. Halse says the experience of seeing calm fish underwater, moving efficiently without the agitation historically associated with the process, provided the clearest confirmation yet that the idea could work at scale.

His own test is simpler.

“I would not want to move fish without the SmoothMove.”

There is something particularly satisfying about this technology travelling from southwestern New Brunswick to Norway, a country Halse speaks about with enormous admiration and one of the places most closely associated with modern salmon aquaculture. Yet when asked whether SmoothMove could have been created somewhere else, his answer is striking.

“It’s hard to imagine what we’ve done could be possible anywhere else in the world.”

Within a remarkably small radius of St. Andrews exists an ecosystem that gave ECI access to fish, research facilities, husbandry expertise, manufacturing capability, industry partners and government support. The Huntsman Marine Science Centre has been important to the research. Local manufacturing expertise has allowed ideas to become physical objects. Industry participation has provided real-world environments in which those objects could be tested.

And then there is something harder to quantify.

“There’s something to do with East Coast ingenuity,” says Halse. “Looking beyond what’s there and imagining what’s possible.”

He pauses before making a statement that perhaps captures the ambition behind ECI better than any corporate mission statement could.

“We are a really talented group of engineers and I would say it’s not so ridiculous to assert that we can build anything. But here’s the interesting question: what do you build?”

For a small Atlantic province, that question matters.

Atlantic Canada’s finfish farming sector has grown alongside the region’s longstanding wild-capture fisheries into a major economic engine in its own right. Its economic footprint now reaches thousands of workers and more than 1,400 businesses. The opportunity for New Brunswick is therefore not simply to produce fish, but to export the expertise, engineering and technology required by an increasingly important global food industry.

And that is where Halse believes SmoothMove could become particularly consequential.

His argument is that stress during handling is not merely a welfare consideration. It can have repercussions throughout the production system, affecting fish health, mortality, operational efficiency and ultimately the economics of farming. Improve that process across a global salmon industry operating at enormous scale and relatively small improvements begin producing very large numbers.

Halse estimates that reducing losses and inefficiencies associated with fish handling could represent an opportunity to improve global salmon-farming output by around $1 billion annually.

The ambition, in other words, is not simply to make a better funnel.

“It is extremely gratifying to have a problem that you’re working on that feels good on so many fronts,” he says. “It’s ethical, and it’s very, very economically rewarding.”

Slater offers the artist’s translation: “Happy fish equals healthy outcomes.”

SmoothMove is ultimately about developing a process that can move fish safely, calmly, reliably and efficiently throughout their life cycle, from hatchery to harvest, reducing the pre-stress events that can compromise whatever happens next. If that can be achieved consistently and internationally, the implications extend from animal welfare to food security, productivity, sustainability and the economics of one of the world’s fastest-growing sources of seafood.

There is much still to discover. Halse is careful not to speak as though the work is finished. If anything, success has revealed a larger field of possibilities.

“We’re excited about what we’ve done,” he says, “but we’re just as excited about what we’re left to discover.”

Perhaps that is the most New Brunswick part of the story.

An engineer looked at a problem everyone in his industry knew existed and decided it did not have to remain that way. He invited an artist into an engineering project. Together, surrounded by scientists, manufacturers, farmers, crews and researchers, they spent years observing something humans cannot experience for themselves: what the world might feel like to a fish.

The result is now moving millions of salmon thousands of kilometres from the place where the idea began.

“It’s easy to tear things down,” Halse says. “Creating is a lot of work.”

And sometimes creating something capable of changing a global industry begins with the humility to stop telling the world how it should work and become curious enough to watch how it actually does.

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