Yantai, a coastal city in East China's Shandong province, saw a dramatic increase in marine ranching development with its gross dedicated area ranking first in China.

A marine ranch is a certain sea area in which fishermen adapt large-scale fishery facilities and systematic management systems to use the natural marine environment to raise marine resources including fish, shrimp, shellfish and algae.

It is just like grazing flocks and herds on a farm.

Yantai rolled out strategies to develop offshore marine ranch equipment such as multi-functional ocean ranch platforms and to build an intelligent, informative and diversified management system.

Mingbo marine ranching in Laizhou Bay can hold 160,000 cubic meters of water and breed more than 4,500 tons of fish every year.

"The ranching is set up with eight platforms which can realize automatic baiting, biomass estimation and other intelligent control automation, promoting the company's fishing and breeding from offshore to deep sea," Li Bo, the general manager of Mingbo Aquatic Products Company said.

Yantai city innovated the linkage mode of "marine industry + pasture" to realize the shift of growth driver from an old to a new one.

It has built the first semi-submersible and jack-up multi-functional management platform for marine ranching in China, and has solved the problems of insufficient development of the far-reaching sea and backward fishery equipment and technology.

"The marine ranch platform utilizes the natural marine environment and large-scale fishery facilities to help fishers raise marine resources in the far-reaching sea area," Wang Jianzhong, the CEO of CIMC Raffles said.

"It also monitors the conditions of ranching including hydrologic data forming a marine big data platform."

To date, CIMC Raffles has delivered 16 marine ranches and has six more under construction, which can meet the needs of coastal areas on the Yellow and Bohai seas, as well as others. Yantai will focus further on deepwater semi-submersible drilling platforms and deep sea marine ranching construction.

The H430 self-elevating marine ranch platform developed by CIMC Raffles is delivered in Laishan district of Yantai on March 10. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]