SPEAKERS
Lourdes Gant, Terry Brooks
Lourdes Gant 00:05
As a business owner of an aquaculture company, how can you take the first step to be profitable and sustainable at the same time? That’s what we’re going to be talking about in these episodes. Hello, and welcome to the Business of Agriculture podcast.
This is the podcast for the Sustainable Business movement in the aquafarming and ocean ranching industries. This podcast aims to amplify the voices of entrepreneurs addressing the United Nations global goals, aka Sustainable Development Goals. Number 14, to conserve and sustainably use the oceans and the seas, listening to fellow business aquaculturists in their journey in this new model of food production, of making their business sustainable, and help the ecology of the ocean, while also making a profit all at the same time.
Get inspired to learn how even small to medium businesses can make an impact, save the seas, leave a legacy, and have a better quality of life. One of our goals is to take away a nugget of wisdom that will help your business move from the industrial revolution to business 5.0. Our vision is that collaboration in the aquaculture industry. I am Lourdes Gant your host.
As an agriculture business owner, How do you tackle the balance between being able to run a sustainable business and being profitable at the same time? That’s what we’re going to be talking about in this episode. If you listen to our last episode, I interviewed Dr. Yomi Alabi and he discussed how the aquaculture industry is seasonality, as those of you in the same sphere know is both a blessing and a disadvantage in the aquaculture industry. He also talked about rootstock genomics and water quality management as to future trends.
Welcome to Episode 13 of the Business of Aquaculture. In this episode, I’m delighted to have a highly recommended guest, Mr. Terry Brooks. Hi, Terry, welcome to the show.
Terry Brooks 02:06
Hi, are you doing?
Lourdes Gant 02:07
I’m doing great.
Terry Brooks 02:08
Excellent.
Lourdes Gant 02:10
He is the managing director of Golden Eagles Sablefish in beautiful British Columbia, Canada. Today, marketing and fish production at both companies is stable. The key is to because Terry said is being realistic about fish production numbers. Golden Eagles Sablefish is the pioneer of sablefish aquaculture and exists as the only source of farm sablefish available on the global commercial marketplace. Welcome again to the show, Terry, I am glad to have you here.
Terry Brooks 02:37
Yeah, welcome. Thank you very much and glad to be here.
Lourdes Gant 02:41
So let’s get the ball rolling and tell me how did you get started in the agriculture industry.
Terry Brooks 02:47
I came from a fishing family background degeneration my grandfather actually started one of the first small hatcheries down in souk, named after him the Jack Brooks hatchery. So I do have some lineage in both the wild fish and in the aquaculture and how I actually got into aquaculture is basically my family and the people I was fishing with when I was 16, 17 years old. Back in the early 80s.
He said to me that if we continue fishing our wild fish like we are now there’s going to be no feature in commercial fishing. So, I was actually sort of somewhat led to getting into aquaculture into this new thing called aquaculture. In the early 80s. I was quite young and from there basically have been made a career out of aquaculture, spend a bit of time in Norway a bit of time in Chile to see how other places in the world did aquaculture but of course, species being my home, as always been the number one focus for me is how to sustain aquaculture in British Columbia.
Lourdes Gant 03:50
That’s fantastic. I’m always fascinated with people who have this lineage. It’s almost like you’re aquaculture in your blood.
Terry Brooks 03:57
Yeah, without even knowing it exactly.
Lourdes Gant 04:00
Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s amazing. I think you’re the second guest that I have on the show who has this the first one was Bill Taylor from Taylor’s shellfish hatcheries from but I’m always really just fascinated how it comes about on how people got into space. So thank you for sharing that. So for my second question, what do you think or probably have experienced even seen are the pros and cons. I will add people call it a disadvantage or some issues in the agriculture industry.
Terry Brooks 04:27
Well, I think with all industries, there are lots of issues. And I think globally, as we’re learning we’ve only really been doing aquaculture on a global scale. I taught you on the finfish side of the global scale for really only the past 30 years.
So in the protein development in agriculture, it’s been around for 1000s of years. And in agriculture, it’s much younger so I always look at it. We’ve we learned from agriculture, you know what they’ve done and if you look at you know, in agriculture, we only raise five species of animals. When we look at it, we’ve basically got cows, chickens, sheep, the hogs and turkeys are really the mainstay of our protein production in the world. And this is over 1000s of years.
So in aquaculture being new, we’ve naturally jumped into the salmon right away, not so much it may be have been the best species to raise because we as a society had a lot of experience with raising salmon through the wild hatcheries. So we jumped into that naturally. And I looked at that many years ago.
And that’s why I got into sablefish, because many years ago, I said, I think there are other species that are going to be better suited. And I think we have yet to learn how to better understand where this species we should be raising, you know, we don’t raise cows on the top of mountains for a reason we raised them in certain areas.
And in aquaculture, people tend to think that we can raise fish anywhere, and we should and, and I take a different view where I really think we need to understand the species that we’re going to raise because I don’t think there’s going to be as many species as we think in aquaculture. So yeah, that’s sort of one of the views I have on the challenges of agriculture, and just one of them.
Lourdes Gant 06:17
I like how you said that, and I know that I’m a baby in this industry as well. And agriculture, as you know, is very new. And I like how you said, Can you say are those again, so the cows, the chickens?
Terry Brooks 06:27
Yeah, five species, we have cows, chickens, turkeys, hogs, and sheep. And that makes up 95% of our protein intake from animals around the globe.
Lourdes Gant 06:41
I love that. And as you mentioned, as well, understanding the species that we grow can help us I guess, accelerate progress if we have a better understanding of how it will thrive in a natural environment. As I can imagine, with sablefish. Sablefish have really close something to my heart. I don’t know it’s English for it. But it has a connection with me because I grew up in the Philippines. And when I was being trained as an auditor, every time we finish a client, we are actually brought to this fine dining restaurant and Gandhara Sablefish is one of my favorites. Excellent. So it’s great. I look forward to having them again. So I think one of the things that I asked us well is the pros that you see in being in this industry.
Terry Brooks 07:25
So I think there are so many pros, and that’s why it’s rapidly developing over the years. And if you look at the aquaculture species, and the production over the wild, you can see that aquaculture protein production is overtaking the wild catch, which is just a natural trend. So I think the pros we have here is we’re very untapped.
And if I go away from the global view and go into the British Columbia, Canada view, we have always been a huge exporter of salmon, cod, halibut. But we have and we continue to be the next order of salmon because of salmon aquaculture, and which is a high-quality product. But we in British Columbia and Canada, we haven’t done a really great job on the export of our wild fisheries to get maximum value.
I’ve got lots of views on how we can maximize value out of the wild fishery. But on the agriculture side, the big pro is we’re situated with such a good coastline, such an experienced group of bass aquaculture suppliers. We’re very lucky to have that globally very lucky to have that. I think though, we’re really missing some government policy to really kick the industry off. So I think the pros that we need to work on here is some government policy.
Lourdes Gant 08:49
Yeah, I think everybody’s on the same boat in terms of this challenge in the agriculture industry we’re in, I guess, bureaucracy needs to catch up in terms of the demand on how this agriculture industry needs to be managed. But now you got me curious, so why don’t you go ahead and tell us how can you maximize value in the wild fisheries?
Terry Brooks 09:10
Well, coming from me My background is exactly in the wild fishery and but I just love fish in general. I think everybody whether it’s farmed or wild, we’re all fish people. I can always tell when I’m talking to fish people, they have it in their blood and when we look at we go out and we catch salmon in BC right now we go and we harvest to salmon, whether it’s a sockeye a pink salmon or a chum salmon, and we’ve always been price takers the big difference that I’ve seen in aquaculture.
Is it the in agriculture we have a bit of more pull in our pricing? And on the farm, the poor commercial fisherman comes into the dock and his price has gone down four times by the time he reaches the dock. And when you look at a good example of the spot prawns, you know, the commercial fishermen in the last couple of years have not been getting top dollar for their spots prawns.
But when you go into the store, they’re 40, 50 times the price or not sorry, $40 to $50, which is more than three or four times the price the fisherman gets for. So we have a bet we have to work better on the economic prosperity out of our fisheries. So we have to look at that from more of a resource point of view. But actually interesting, in the cod core, I’m a big fan of looking at the East Coast cod crash, and how it all happened. I read a lot about a talk with a lot of people.
And we were the number three exporter of cod in the world before the crash. But we were number 80 in value. So we were exporting all of this fish, but it was of low value. So we have to change that model. And there’s a lot that we can learn on the west coast from what happened on the East Coast, on the wild with the collapse of the cod, which is a great topic. Because I think anybody in aquaculture, these are some major things that happened. And it’s good to understand what happens in the wild fishery, and how those were consumed and how it’s going on today because it’s integral in understanding the fish business.
Lourdes Gant 11:15
That’s amazing. Thank you for bringing those to statistics. And I guess, just like in any industry, if we can learn from our history so that we can avoid the pitfalls that happened before from previous species and practices fisheries, for example. It is very much. Yes, very much. So I’m going to go to my favorite question which I ask all my guests, which is give us your future trends in the next three years. 10 years, what guide you.
Terry Brooks 11:41
Awesome, awesome about the trend, I always look back and go, Well, if I look back three years ago, if I’m doing the same thing I was three years ago, then we’re not progressing and we’re not doing our job. So I always love the trends thing. Do I think it’s great? I think the big thing trends in your thinking from a global point of view, or do you think from a VC point of view? Or would you like to hear?
Lourdes Gant 12:03
Well, why don’t we hear both?
Terry Brooks 12:04
Okay, well, let’s go from BC right off the bat is, we have an excellent aquaculture sort of industry here in the salmon farming world that is brought to us world-class people and world-class equipment and suppliers. And they’re continuing to build in course, we always hear about AI, but we look at the water temperatures, the oxygen to all of these probes all of this information now we have access to that we didn’t have even access five years ago. So I think obviously that trend, but a big part of the rate of aquaculture is species and breeding because we’re farming the ocean.
And people need to understand that, that we need to pick the right species. And then we need to come up with the breeding program. So we can better breed and make the animals more efficient, more domesticated. And a lot of people don’t like to hear the domestication of fish they think it is kind of different from a domesticated house, but it’s absolutely necessary. So a trend in BC, and globally will be what species are we going to raise?
And how are we going to breed these animals to be more efficient? Use plant protein, like right now with disabling fish. Disabled fish is not a fish that can consume carbohydrates or plants. But through good nutrition, we’re actually able to feed a 20% part of the diet of the animal now that was plant protein-based, which helps our sustainability. So that trend of sustainability. It all fits in. But again, I think the trend is I go back to the government policy, if we don’t have a better trend in our government policy, and our lead agencies then we’re going to have an uphill battle.
Lourdes Gant 13:49
Well, thank you for saying all those. It’s interesting. You mentioned domestication because, in the species that we cultivate as a gooey duck, one of the things that we worry about actually was them being domesticated because we feel that after they leave the hatchery and we bring them out to our grow outside, that they may not have enough stamina to fight the predators because they’re being domesticated. But this is a wild guess. But it’s interesting that you mentioned that. Well, thank you so much for that on a global scale. Do you have any more addition and this future trends other than what you mentioned in terms of access to technology and sustainability?
Terry Brooks 14:24
Yeah, I think on a global trend, I think the most important thing is that we as local aquaculturists are plugged into the global trends. So every time it There’s no use and I’ve learned as many times before, is don’t reinvent the wheel.
There’s always an industry or people out there that have leading-edge technology and it’s really good to immerse yourself in that leading-edge technology and, and I think at some point, it would be interesting to do a podcast on the recirculating aquaculture system for the Ross systems is going on. Because when you talk about global trends, there’s one that’s got a lot of discussions.
Lourdes Gant 15:00
Absolutely the rest system is just going leaps and bounds as well. But I’m glad that you brought it out too. Because one of the things that I was thinking actually, I’m ending season one, I have three more guests on your 13th. I have two more and I’m finished with season one, I’m actually going to collate all the trends that the people mentioned in the podcast and then share her with all the guests.
Terry Brooks 15:20
Well, actually, no, it’s awesome. Yeah.
Lourdes Gant 15:25
But thank you once again for being here. On the show today, Terry, my biggest takeaway was when you mentioned economic prosperity out of the fisheries of maximizing value. But I also love that you mentioned terms of how government policy can be more proactive and what the industry can leverage from what already happened in previous species that were agriculture. So thank you for being on the show again, to our guests and to our audience.
Remember, you helped build the home in the Philippines every time you listen to the podcast via the B1G1.cominitiative, shared a broadcast with your friends and family who you think may benefit. I’ll see you in the next episode, where I’ll be interviewing Jennifer Woodland, the CEO of national seafood Limited Partnership, but also the Chairman of the Canadian aquaculture industry Alliance. Thank you again, Terry, and really appreciate your time today. Thank you had a great time.
Terry Brooks 16:20
Appreciate your time too.
Lourdes Gant 16:25
Thank you for listening, and I hope you are inspired by this episode. Do take a moment and share this with your friends and colleagues and rate and review the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. I’d love to know what your biggest takeaway from this conversation has been? What are you going to do differently? Please share thoughts across social media and tag us for links and show notes for this episode, visit our website www.sustainableaquaculture.ca/podcast. Thank you again. I hope you will join me on the next episode and together we can help create a better business in aquaculture.
