First ova received by Thor Salmon

Icelandic fish farming company Thor Salmon reached an important milestone when it received its first batch of eggs from Benchmark Genetics last week.

“An incredible effort has been made in recent weeks, and a big thank you goes to our farming team and construction team for making this possible,” the company writes in a press release.

Thor Salmon (formerly called Landeldi), which will use seawater naturally filtered through volcanic rock, is part of a cluster of land-based salmon farms in South Iceland. Two companies - First Water and GeoSalmo - are building farms on the same stretch of coast, and another farmer, Laxey, is building a salmon facility on the nearby island of Vestmannaeyjar.

“This marks the beginning of the next phase of our journey, the actual farming of salmon,” writes Thor Salmon chief executive Halldor Ragnar Gislason.

Raised £23.5 million

Ground was broken for phase 1 – a smolt facility with a capacity to produce 3.5 million smolts – in July last year and operations will start in the summer of 2025. The tanks for smolt production have been manufactured and installed by the Icelandic supplier Trefjar.

Thor Salmon announced earlier in May that it had raised €28 million (£23.5m / US$32m), through a private placement to finance the next phase of the land-based project.

The funds will be used for the development of a grow-out facility with a capacity of 4,750 tonnes of salmon, with the first harvest planned for autumn 2027. This marks phase 2 of the company's long-term plan to produce 20,000 tonnes of Atlantic salmon annually on land.