© Minnowtech
Called the BRS-1 and developed by Minnowtech*, a company from Baltimore, the device aims to improve shrimp farming efficiency and can also help to pick up on abnormalities such as disease outbreaks too.
“Minnowtech has been all over the world asking farmers about their shrimp biomass problem – underfeeding, overfeeding, not being able to manage their harvests, not knowing when to harvest. Exporters, importers: everyone is suffering from the biomass problem,” explains founder, Dr Suzan Shahrestani.
“Shrimp are grown in murky water. You put in aeration systems and have millions of animals swimming around the pond and it’s really hard for farmers to understand how the population is growing and to get the story of their farm,” she adds.
While shrimp farmers traditionally estimate biomass by netting small areas of their ponds and extrapolating those data, Minnowtech’s device uses sonar, combined with machine vision and computer vision, to count individual animals in the water column and Shahrestani compares it to “shrimp TV”.
Minnowtech sells the devices and charges a monthly fee for data reporting. The devices have a three to five-year lifespan and take three full grow-out cycles to calibrate (so they can be adjusted in line with the farm’s technology and husbandry practices).
“It's a window that allows us to ensure that we understand potential events, operations, things that affect our specific to that farm within that pond. And we say three months because that is how long a grow-out cycle is, which means that we're going in from DOC [day of culture] one to harvest, and we're capturing all the potential events. We're also seeing how the shrimp are growing in your pond, what the aerators are doing. It gives us an opportunity to assess the dataset and understand what we're dealing with. We're not a thermometer that you can just drop in. We really do need to go in and kind of show the system what the features of the pond are,” Shahrestani explains.
While the devices are currently deployed in a wide range of shrimp farming regions and systems – from intensive ponds in Indonesia to indoor RAS facilities in Europe – the company is especially targeting producers in Ecuador.
“Ecuador is where we've focused our resources and we have the most customers and we understand the way shrimp are growing in a five hectare pond. It also has a lot to do with both the market and the customer profile – they’re big companies that want to invest in tech. We're also in the same time zone and they're using the US dollar,” Shahrestani reflects.
© Minnowtech
Impressive results
Building a good working relationship with their Ecuadorian customers means that they are now at liberty to share some of their results.
“We’ve been working in Ecuador for a few years and are finally allowed to share some data from one of our customers and it’s really exciting because we’re starting to understand the population dynamics of shrimp – it’s not a linear growth curve, farmers can react to the patterns,” Shahrestani notes.
“It becomes useful when things are not ideal. We create a baseline that can be used to ensure that farmers don’t broach their carrying capacity,” she adds.
This was confirmed by one of their trials, which revealed that the farmer in question would have been better off to harvest 11 days before they did, as during that additional time the pond’s carrying capacity was exceeded, mortality levels increased and the total biomass started to drop. According to Minnowtech’s calculations, this meant that the final value of the shrimp harvested from the pond was approximately $30,000 lower than it could have been.
“We show it with a level of accuracy and a level of consistency that can inform the farmer when to harvest,” Shahrestani observes.
In another trial their sensor captured a dramatic drop in biomass that was indicative of a disease outbreak.
“Within a few days we told the company that something was happening in the pond and that we believed they had to go check it,” Shahrestani explains.
“The data’s talking, it’s talking loud and clear and this is the type of information that will change the industry by removing uncertainty,” she adds.
A global outlook
The company calibrates their device for all manner of systems.
“I think that our challenge is getting on enough farms to understand the variability in how farmers are growing and the variability and the equipment they're using. Answering questions like: When do they drop the water before harvest? What are their feeding patterns? What are their aeration patterns?” Shahrestani explains.
The pond design will dictate the required setup.
“If we’re in Southeast Asia we put one device in the pond, connected to a cable and communicating with our pond-side electronics and then it’s sent up to the cloud to provide the farmer with biomass. In more extensive systems, such as the 5 ha ponds you typically see in Ecuador, we’d put three sensors in each pond, and distribute them from the entrada to the salida. Installation can be done in under an hour but you do need an internet connection and electricity,” Shahrestani observes.
© Minnowtech
Farmers’ reactions
Shahrestani is aware that it takes time for farmers to integrate the company’s data into their daily operations.
“There's a level of excitement coupled with a level of hesitation because this is a new type of information that now has to be integrated into how they're making decisions. It's our job to get them to trust the data and trust the information. It's really about making the information digestible. So I think we're at the stage now with the customers where we're in constant dialogue with them. They're very excited. We just have to figure out how they can use it as a decision-making tool where it's going to save them money every day. We’re there with some of them and we’re making tremendous progress with the others in the past few months with that open dialogue with customers,” she points out.
How the system will evolve
Looking ahead, Shahrestani notes that the company’s pipeline includes improvements to the current system, which are likely to include automated alerts to notify customers of unusual changes in shrimp biomass. She also believes that there’s scope to use the device for fish that are grown in turbid water, such as pangasius in Asia and catfish in the US.
And the company is also working on providing insights into shrimp sizes as well as how farming activities impact shrimp behaviour.
“There are efficiencies that can be made once you understand how the shrimp are reacting to what you're doing: like whether you’re using one feed or another. Then you can really start to hypothesise about your operations because it becomes a tool to track how your shrimp respond, much like is done with cows and sheep on land,” Shahrestani explains.
In the shorter term she adds that they will be able to provide daily – rather than weekly – biomass data before the end of the year, enabling farmers to react much more quickly to any changes in their ponds.
*Minnowtech is part of Hatch’s investment portfolio, but The Fish Site retains editorial independence.
