Aquaculture Innovation Europe – Showcase
Creating a buzz LONDON based Entocycle, which won the Aquaculture Innovation Europe award for nutrition, has developed patented technology to industrially farm black soldier flies and make a new form of protein, replacing traditional feed ingredients, such as fishmeal and soy. The company collects organic food waste, including spent grain from local breweries or used grounds from local coffee roasters. The waste is fed to black
soldier fly larvae in an indoor, controlled environment and in just six days the larvae consume the organic waste, converting it into high-protein body mass. The live insects are separated from the waste material they produce during bioconversion, which itself is also a valuable product as it’s a natural fertiliser which can help farmers and food producers aid plant growth. At the stage of harvesting, the insects are 45-65 per
cent protein, containing many essential amino acids. The insects are then processed into a flour ready for distribution. Entocycle supplies protein flour to the feed companies, which combine this with other products to manufacture feed pellets. The company said its technology combines automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning to bring world leading efficiencies to protein production.
Above: Simon Doherty and Entocycle’s James Millar
Big data for disease control But that is just the start and there needs to be action that comes out of TONY Chen’s first venture into aquaculture ended in failure. As a computthe collection of data. In Norway last autumn they enacted the traffic light er science graduate from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), policy to force the industry to collaborate more on the health issue. frustrated with his job, he decided to build an aquaponics system in his ‘We’ve already seen things happening as a result of this policy…farmers basement, using an old bookcase. Sadly, said Chen, all the fish died. are doing a better job of maintaining low lice thresholds during the critical Undeterred, Chen went on to establish Manolin, the company creating a periods of the year when wild salmon are navigating out to the oceans.’ digital health analytics platform for resource sharing between fish farms, But, said Chen, there’s still room for improvement, and as their product and winner of one of the three innovation awards in London. was scaling up he and his partner drove along the coast and visited farms. ‘The future of our ocean is going to depend not just on one government, They heard that farmers wanted to see the industry grow but grow in the one person or one company, it’s really how do we get on the same page. I right way. They said while there was so much data it was hard to aggregate believe we’re building digital channels to make this happen,’ said Chen. and understand it. Because Norway is at the forefront of aquaculture development and the ‘And it’s hard to report it – they’re doing a lot of paperwork and we Norwegian government is better at collecting data than other aquaculthought we could help with that. ture nations, Manolin realised it should base its pioneering project in the ‘As computer scientists, we decided to automate the process of entercountry. ing all this data. We’ve built an ASC [Aquaculture Stewardship Council] ‘The Norwegians value collaboration, resource sharing and innovation – we recognised that as outsiders and that’s really what brought our team to dashboard to help them manage the monthly reporting that’s necessary for them to maintain their certification. Norway,’ said Chen. ‘This not only saves them time and money but it is helping to save He and his business partner, John Costantino, worked for the US governfarmers’ peace of mind. We just launched this platform two weeks ago and ment before they joined the Hatch Accelerator programme – which helps already have five certified sites that are part of the platform, using us to aquaculture start-ups - and headed to Bergen, to ‘pursue our dreams of manage their certification. helping aquaculture grow’. ‘Our mission is to standardise how the entire industry talks about health – That was six months ago and now Chen and the team are trying to solve helping farmers better understand what’s happening in their area. salmon farmers’ number one problem: sea lice. ‘That develops into simplified reporting, easier certification, advanced ‘Lice are evolutionary superstars - it’s not about finding that silver bullet, analytics and a general understanding of what’s happening in our environit’s about how we manage these health issues as a collective whole,’ he ment.’ said. This can be utilised by the supply chain and help set better policies for the Norway is doing that by collecting data. They have policies where farmers industry and help it grow. submit information every single week on lice counts and environmental Chen said their initial platform is free and then conditions. What this has created is a wealth subscription based services are offered on top of of information that many different parties can that. participate in and add new value. ‘In order to continue our mission we’re looking to ‘While all this information is available, they’re raise about $500,000 over these next few months slow on getting information fast enough, so to scale up our team and continue hitting our we developed a health response system that milestones.’ notifies farmers when an outbreak is happening Chen later told Fish Farmer that they were deliverand neighbours have had high sea lice values, or ing their service fast and focusing on smaller tradiwhen they’ve had treatments. It’s really about tional farms, although they had some big companies moving this information a little bit quicker.’ on board. Chen said they launched their platform as part Scotland could be the next target market but he of the Hatch Accelerator and in a little over five said there was not quite the wealth of data collecmonths it is used by 19 per cent of Norway’s Above: Tony Chen collects his award tion here as there was in Norway. salmon farmers.
44
London - Start Ups.indd 44
www.fishfarmer-magazine.com
03/10/2018 15:47:10