AquaMaof Aquaculture Technologies, with 15 years of experience developing recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS), is poised to become a player in the growing sector of the aquaculture industry, according to Shai Silbermann, vice president of marketing and sales for the company.
Silbermann, in an interview with SeafoodSource during the China Fisheries show in Qingdao, China, said the company’s initial philosophy when starting its research and development into RAS is a big reason behind their current success with the method.
“We came from our Israeli point of view, our constraints, that we don’t want to pay all the money for energy consumption, and also the problems with the water,” Silbermann said. That design philosophy, stemming from environmental constraints in Israel, has allowed AquaMaof to produce a RAS that uses a fraction of the energy of some other systems.
Those energy constraints, he added, have also led the company to create a system that is relatively simple in nature, to minimize the amount of maintenance that it will need.
The result is a quiet, efficient system.
“It is very simple to maintain, very simple to do the operation,” Silbermann said.
What makes AquaMaof’s RAS products successful, he said, is that initial design philosophy which emphasized low cost of production. That allows the company to avoid relying on higher prices.
“You cannot afford yourself to have something where the cost of production is very very high,” Silbermann said.
Included in that is the human element of production.
“One of the challenging things, as much as I see it now, is also the HR, the human resources,” Silbermann said. “We implement sophisticated technologies, we are doing a revolution with the RAS system, but somebody needs to manage it.”
That, he said, links back to the need for simplicity.
“You need to make it simple, otherwise it will be very hard to get people to work for the RAS system,” Silbermann said.
The company’s philosophy has proven successful with its announcement of its latest product: RAS-based shrimp production. The company recently announced that it has produced land-based vannamei shrimp via its RAS that has had high survivability and no disease issues.
That RAS technology that produced that shrimp will be ready for the market fairly soon, Silbermann said.
“We already got the product, and we are now at the last curve of the R&D process,” he said. “Hopefully ... we are going to go out in something like 2020.”
Current targets for the company’s systems, he said, is around 2,000 tons.
Shrimp, Silbermann added, is likely just the start of the company’s forays into determining how to successfully produce different species using RAS technology. However, He could not elaborate on what species the research is being performed on.
“We are looking to the future, and then we calculate the things we need to do for the next step,” he said.
Photo courtesy of Chris Chase/SeafoodSource
