Aquaculture Costs


We asserted that our systems are considerably cheaper than others on offer.

You can verify this yourself.

The figure that makes the most sense to us is the capital costs per kg of fish that a system can produce.

For instance, if a system costs R100k and it produces 2000 kg of fish in a year the capital costs are R100 000 divided by 2000 kg, or 50/kg. This does mean you are costing in the complete cost of the capital investment in the first year - it is more normal to spread this over 5 years (you can depreciate the capital costs over this period as well).

Hence your capital cost per kg of fish you produce for the next five years will be R10/kg (R50 split over 5 years).

Add in your running and operational costs and you get the cost to produce each kg of fish in your operation.

Our aquaculture systems are built as Fit For Purpose models. In other words the important stuff that you do need is all taken care of and is the focal point of the system. The less important stuff that is not needed but that is a 'nice to have' can be added to the system at any point in tne future.

Hence our unit cost when matched to the captical coss of production is the lowest available. And you do not have to spend millions to put a system together to start off with. You can do a simple pilot project that will comprise of around 10 systems which will give you a hatchery and production system from the start. If you like you can event start with a single PondInnaBox if you have never kept fish before in order to learn the ropes.

There are systems that we have seen that offer you water volumes on a par or even slightly larger than ours, albeit considerably more expensive. Aside from the cost however, in 99% of such cases this is a single body of water. In other words you are hedging your bets when it comes to disease. The one thing we can be sure of that is sooner or later you will get disease in your system. 30 smaller independant ponds have a far higher disease resistance built in than one big 300kl pond.

Once you are comfortable with your skill levels and the fish you are growing, by all means, build bigger ponds. Or stick with the tried and proven model you have developed yourself and grow your system along the module model. But when starting up, it makes sense to us to diversify risk as much as it is possible to do.

The modular ponds we use all run using low power pumped systems. A complete 300kl facility can be pumped for as little as 1.6kW (excluding airpumps and UV lights if required). It goes without saying that next to labour and feed your power bill is the biggest line item in your monthly running costs and hence going low power makes a dramatic improvement to your model's profitability.