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 this episodes. Hello, and welcome to the business of agriculture podcast. This is the podcast for the Sustainable Business movement in the Aqua farming and ocean ranching industries. This podcast aims to amplify the voices of entrepreneurs addressing the United Nation 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 oceans ecology, 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 a collaboration in the aquaculture industry. I’m Lourdes Gant your host.
Lourdes Gant 01:25
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 this episode. Welcome to Episode One of the business of agriculture podcast. This episode we have Mr. Eric Gant of Manatee Holdings Limited. He has been an agriculturist since 1988, and is an early adopter in subtitle ocean wrenching, you will gain insights on how often in business wisdom comes from good judgment. good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. So if you’re on the brink of having to make a wise decision you’re experiencing in your business or existing projects at the moment. You will learn a lot from this premier interview. So listen in and I hope you enjoy this episode.
Lourdes Gant 02:14
In the next episode, I’ll be interviewing Mr. Tom Broadley, who is also one of the pioneers in the gooey duck aquaculture industry and globally and in Canada.
Lourdes Gant 02:23
Welcome, Mr. Gant. How are you doing?
Eric Gant 02:26
Very good. It’s nice to be here.
Lourdes Gant 02:28
I’d like for you to share with our audience how you got started in the aquaculture industry.
Eric Gant 02:34
Well, I actually started as a dive fishermen, not an agricultural. These are fisheries in which we use underwater divers in order to harvest gormet foods in the sea. Mostly, we’ve got clamps, horse clams, sea cucumber, red and green urchins. At one point in the development of those fisheries, I became concerned that we were starting to over harvest the stocks.
Eric Gant 02:58
And so I attended a meeting between the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, biological managers, and the Board of Directors of the Underwater Harvest Association. It was a formal debate, in which the biological managers of DFO took the position that the natural recruitment rate was 1.2%. And the fishermen’s Association had hired a mathematician to take the position that the natural recruitment rate was 1.8%. Now this doesn’t sound like much, but it amounted to millions of dollars in difference in revenue to the fishermen, if they won the debate. Now, in the process of listening to this six hour debate between these two mathematicians, the first thing that I became clear to me was that neither one of them actually knew what the total allowable catch should actually be. They didn’t understand the size of the stops, and they certainly didn’t understand the natural improvement rate. That sort of reminded me of the old expression.
Eric Gant 03:58
An engineer thinks that his calculations are a reflection of reality, or physicists thinks that reality is a reflection of his calculations, and a mathematician doesn’t care. So it became obvious to me that we needed to change the system of management of how we were harvesting from the ocean. I was reminded of a friend of mine, who had gone into a small business as a tree farmer. He had bought a pair of Clydesdale horses and he was selectively harvesting the best quality logs he could find from the forest from his tree farm and maneuvering them out of the forest with a minimum amount of damage to sell them and then planting three seedlings for every tree that he took out. To me, we needed to do something like this in the wild fishery, and that naturally led me towards aquaculture.
Lourdes Gant 04:50
Perfect. My second question is along the lines of the pros and cons of being in the aquaculture industry. I know you have other projects that you are also going into, but maybe give our audience a background on what’s the best thing about agriculture and maybe some of the disadvantages now?
Eric Gant 05:10
Well, I’m a fundamentalist. So the three basic challenges you face in agriculture is, first of all, you have to learn how to agriculture to species. And this is tremendously challenging, it can take decades before you’re successful. The second challenge you have is you have to do it profitably. This can also take years. The third challenge is how do you do this profitably in a way that does not cause damage to the surrounding ecology? I was raised as a hunter in a farming district. And I watched from the forest is farmers clear cut huge areas of the natural ecology, totally destroying it in order to intensively monoculture one plant or animal for profits. And I saw all of the problems that evolved from that intensive approach, dust storms that never existed before, parasites, diseases, predators. So I thought we needed to come up with a way to agriculture that’s producing food from the sea in a profitable way. But it’s actually beneficial to the surrounding ecology rather than detrimental. And that’s the model, the business model and the production model and the environmental model that we have been shoving into place for the past 30 years.
Lourdes Gant 06:25
Thank you about that. I like how you started that when you’re a fundamentalist. My last question is, what are your top three trends that you’re seeing in the next 10 years in this industry,
Eric Gant 06:39
The ocean has a potential to be able to solve almost all of the macro challenges that we face as a species. There’s a wonderful little book that just came out called seasteading. It’s about homesteading the ocean, I’d highly recommend that people read it because there are some surprising solutions in that, that will help us deal with virtually everything except the population explosion, which of course, we have to deal with ourselves by simply reducing the amount that we breed. But specifically to our species, a trend I see happening in the future is addressing a major challenge, which is referred to nowadays as bio accumulation. This is where toxins move up in the food chain into a greater and greater concentration. It’s very low down at the micro algae level, from human nutrient runoff. But as you move up, they get concentrated in the flesh of the predators that feed at every level so that at the top of the food chain like tuna, or salmon, the concentration is very high. Whereas at the bottom of the food chain, like at micro algae level, it’s very low. So the solution is a new type of aquaculture called algo culture. And this is where humans are culturing algae, and then going through the challenge of turning that algae into tasteful and nutritious human food. Now, in the geoduck, we don’t have to do all of that because the geoduck does it for us naturally. So it is a species that I think is going to fall into favor, far more than it has in the past, because it does address this bio accumulation problem very well.
Eric Gant 08:24
Now, a second trend is that we have to address the nutrient runoff from human occupational on our shorelines This is creating an artificially high, what they call planktonic blooms, micro algae is feeding on these nutrients. And that’s upsetting the natural ecology of the ocean. Now, if we can plant hundreds of millions of bleeder plants, and each one grows to over two pounds apiece, and they feed naturally on this micro algae, it’s going to help to bring the oceans and natural ecology back into balance. So this is another reason why I think you’re going to see a massive increase in the agriculture of species like weed or plants.
Eric Gant 09:08
Now the third trend is something that personally disturbed me, which is that most agricultural products feed the rich. And the primary challenge we’re facing as a species is how do we feed the poor. I like to think of the leader clan as the schmoo of the sea. Now, those of you who aren’t old enough to remember little Abner will have to look that up on the internet. S H M O O. He’s a great military and ugly that really does duplicate and he can be presented to the marketplace in a multitude of different ways, just like the Shmoo can turn himself into a pork chop or steak if that’s what you wanted. And he’s also very prolific, just as the Shmoo was in virtually every frame of the comic strip.
Eric Gant 09:56
So if we can produce them In a large manner, massive scale, we’re not only helping the environment, but we’re also going to be able to help feed the poor because of economies of scale. Now, I estimate that only 500 hector’s is needed in agriculture at a low density that fits into the natural ecology to produce as much food or plans as the entire fishery, which needs then the whole of the coastline of BC, which is 30,000 kilometers. Now, based on my experience as a diver, I would estimate that there’s well over 100,000 hector’s of ground that could be used to produce agriculture, good ducks. Once you get up into that scale, then you no longer are just feeding the rich, you’re also feeding the poor.
Lourdes Gant 10:50
I love that. And I would probably normally ask for three questions. But because this is the premiere episode, my last question is, in the three decades of experience in the agriculture industry, what’s your favorite mistake? Or learning? And why do you think that’s your favorite?
Eric Gant 11:08
My favorite mistake is what I’m running into more and more as we get away from fundamentals and get living in lifestyles that are actually a simulation of reality then, rather than reality. And it was the very first lesson that I learned when I was watching that mathematical debate. intellectualizing based on mathematical model, there’s no substitute for good judgment that’s grounded in reality. If you want to survive as a, as a businessman, you better strive to remove from your own mind, these false beliefs that saturate the existence of the human species.
Lourdes Gant 11:52
Well, thank you very much. My biggest takeaway from this premiere episode is when you were talking about feeding everybody, not just to reach because geoduck is a premium brand, but also for the poor. I love that what you said about that.
Lourdes Gant 12:08
For the next episode, we’ll have Tom Broadly as I mentioned, who will be talking about how they expanded the agriculture industry globally. Thank you, and I’ll see you on the next episode. Bye for now. Thank you for listening, and I hope you are inspired from 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 your 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 agriculture.
