Specialist Aquaculture investor Aquacopia is a New York based venture capital manager.
Managing Director, David Tze recently dropped by the finfish site.
Aquacopia’s website presents its investment focus as ”early-stage seafood farms, aquaculture technologies, and related supply, service, and marketing firms”.
To date,. David’s firm has invested in
- Ocean Farm Technologies, Inc. produces a unique, complete net pen culture system for finfish in deep water. The current, largest cage configuration is over 10,000 cubic meters. Operating submerged or partially surfaced, the Aquapod is a geodesic spheroid comprised of modular, triangular net panels.
- Snapperfarm, Inc., an open ocean fish farm off of Puerto Rico, is a trailblazer in offshore finfish culture. It has harvested four annual crops of cobia.
- Aquacopia made an investment in Oberon FMR, Inc., a firm that produces a high-quality, ultra-sustainable protein meal that is a partial or total replacement for fish meal in aquaculture and animal feeds.
David shares his views on aquaculture as an investment ion this TV interview which profiles offshore aquaculture in the US.
Readers may care to highlight other venture capital investors that have portfolio interests in aquaculture.
The University of Florida has produced a great set of resources introducing health management in recirculating aquaculture systems.
The resource provides links to a set of three articles on:
- general principles
- pathogens
- problem solving
Feeds which are typically formulated with an excess of protein are usually due to one of two reasons: either the protein is not very digestible so more has to be added to meet amino acid requirements, or excess protein is added because specific essential amino acid requirements are not known.
The excess protein provides a large margin of safety so that there will be less chance that essential amino acids are limiting in the diet. It is not economical or necessary to increase the total protein content of a feed to a point where excessive amounts of many amino acids are included in an attempt to meet the requirement for one or more of the essential amino acids that are shortest in supply.
A diet should be formulated based on digestible amino acid values of feed ingredients and an ideal protein.
The excess nitrogen excreted as ammonia by fish may have a negative impact on the environment because it is a major contributor to water pollution.
Because every species of fish and the individual proteins within each species has its own unique amino acid composition, the ideal situation would be to formulate a low protein feed that would minimize nitrogen excretion and at the same time meet all requirements for essential amino acids.
Today, in other species such as poultry and swine, this is done routinely since synthetic essential amino acids (e.g., methionine, lysine, threonine) are commercially available, and these animals utilize these synthetic amino acids efficiently.
A better understanding of the dietary nutrient requirements of cultured fish species and a continual search for accessible, highly digestible proteins to replace expensive fishmeal is essential. This approach coupled with applying the ideal protein concept in the formulation of fish feeds can greatly ameliorate nitrogen pollution arising from fish production systems and increase profitability.
The catfish and trout farms, which account for the vast majority of the food-fish produced in the United States, already have greatly reduced their use of fishmeal in feeds, to a total of around 5% in catfish diets, and a total of 20% in trout diets.
More information on the ideal protein concept is available here.
This material is drawn from document FA144, one of a series of the Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, University of Florida, Florida Cooperative Extension Service, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. First Published: March 2007. Please visit the EDIS Web site at http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu.
There is mounting evidence that the soaring demand for fish (based on its widely promoted health giving nutritional qualities) will be subject to significant competition.
Growth in the aquaculture industry has been buoyant due the challenges faced by wild capture fisheries. This however does not mean that the backers of aquaculture companies will have a free ride to future prosperity or the license to print money - any time soon.
We have canvassed the subject of Omega-3 long chain fatty acids on this site through several posts.
The health-giving properties of fish oils have not gone unnoticed. The fact that there has been a sustained growth in demand for fish has been recognised by food producers from other sectors.
Due to several factors, massive budgets are being directed at the ability to produce Omega-3 long chain fatty acids from non-fish sources:
- In March 2007 Monsanto and The Solae Company announced a collaboration to development of omega-3 from genetically-modified soy beans, which could speed up the availability of the healthy ingredient from new non-marine sources. Monsanto and Solae (with its majority owner DuPont) had each been independently conducting research on soy beans containing high levels of omega-3.
- Two major players in the US healthy oils market Martek and Dow AgroSciences are joining forces to develop a DHA oil from canola. It may be worthy of note that Martek also appeared ranked at number four in our Top 20 list of aquaculture patent holders in an earlier post due predominantly to their position in algae production IP for aquaculture feed.
- BASF is pursuing the goal of being one of the world’s leading companies in the field of Plant Biotechnology by the year 2010. BASF Plant Science, established in 1998, which coordinates an international research and technology platform with eight sites in Europe and North America, develops plants for more efficient agriculture, healthier nutrition and for use as renewable resources. Projects include oil plants of high value in nutritional physiology terms with an elevated level of omega-3-fatty acids.
- LIPGENE is a 5-year (2004 - 2009) sixth framework EU project involving researchers from 25 research centres across 14 EU countries. Lipgene will carry out investigations into the use of modern technology to modify the fat composition of a range of foods so that they contain less of the saturated fatty acids and more of the long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids found in fish oil. LIPGENE research has investigated linseed as a source of omega-3’s.
- In Australia the CSIRO through its Food Futures Flagship has developed plants that produce DHA.
This level of activity is interesting in the world of aquaculture for two reasons:
- Firstly, the widely appreciated health giving properties of consuming oily fish is a major driver of the increasing demand for fish in human nutrition.
- Secondly, the major cost component in the aquaculture value chain is feed. The critical components of aquaculture feed include protein and suitable oils. Traditionally this has been sourced from fishmeal, but this is now unsustainable.
If we can produce omega-3 oils sufficiently cheaply we may be on the path to a suitable substitute for fish meal.
If omega-3s appear in human nutrition from sources other than fish, this may undermine the appeal of the fish product, based on its health giving properties?
What are you thoughts on this?
