Created by Vertical Oceans – a startup previously called Aqualogix – the system has been developed by John Diener and co-founder Enzo Acerbi. John worked in the conventional shrimp sector, for Gold Coin and SyAqua until 2016.
“At that time I visited hundreds of shrimp farms around Asia and I kept seeing a similar pattern, where these farms are dumping raw effluent into the ocean, their intake isn’t far away, they start having problems with bacterial and other diseases, some of them were using antibiotics. I had this cognitive disconnect with what was going on because I fundamentally believe that aquaculture is a really good food production model, but not the way it was done,” he explained to delegates at the Blue Food Innovation Summit.
As a result, he started thinking about how to use technology to make aquaculture more efficient and sustainable. “We ended up inventing our own system – which starts with a production module we call the intelligent habitat or iHAB,” he added.
Diener’s prototype of the system – which he’s built in Singapore – has the capacity to produce 3 tonnes of shrimp a year, while he plans to upscale to a 50-tonne capacity system in the first half of 2023.
“The net result is that we can grow shrimp in about half the time it takes them to grow in a pond environment; we can get a 30 percent improvement in feed conversion, our target is an FCR of 1, but we know we can do better than that; and we actually produce a great tasting product,” said Diener.
Read the entire article at the Fish Site