The Important Role of Research, Knowledge, and Technology in Increasing Cultivation Productivity

Starting from a shrimp farm he has owned since 2016, DELOS Co-founder Guntur Mallarangeng has a dream to bring Indonesia's glory as the largest shrimp culture producer in the world.

Currently, he assesses that the export of marine resources, especially shrimp, in Indonesia is not optimal. This is quite unfortunate, considering that Indonesia is a maritime country with the largest archipelago in the world. The export value is fantastic, which is around $47 billion per year for seafood. However, only $2,5 billion was contributed by shrimp. 

In session #TuesdayStartup this time, Guntur shared some interesting notes that are closely related to his experience in encouraging the shrimp farming industry through research, science, and technology.

Research, knowledge and technology

According to Guntur's records, Indonesia only produces a third or half of the shrimp production produced by countries, such as India and Ecuador. In fact, Indonesia has more than 50.000 km of coastline, while India only has thousands of km.

Why is Indonesia so far behind? There are several factors, mainly because the productivity of the coastline used is still low. "This is actually an opportunity to encourage the aquaculture industry in a sustainable manner, scalable, and become the largest in the world," said Guntur.

To increase cultivation productivity, he called research, knowledge, and technology become the power of pond cultivation. Given that cultivation is related to the maintenance of living things, research and knowledge play an important role in understanding the intricacies of this industry.

"Skill sets what is needed to solve this problem? Operational capabilities, technology and knowledge, as well as good capital support considering this industry has a high risk of business failure. At DELOS, we place people for science and research so that we can use his discoveries in the aquaculture industry to overcome this challenge," he added.

Access to business capital

According to Guntur, 70% of the cultivation challenges occur in the management process to infrastructure that requires large capital. This is an old obstacle that is often experienced by cultivators so that not a few of them are forced to spend their own money. Because of this, they find it difficult to scale up their business and set long-term targets because they are more focused on getting income.

"Aquaculture businesses are less attractive to investors and the financial industry due to a number of factors, such as high failure risk and lack of understanding of business models. Investors are usually willing to invest in businesses that have large assets. The current aquaculture industry is quite fragmented and most of the cultivation entrepreneurs finance themselves or in groups," he explained.

In this case, the platform has a role to bridge investors with business owners so that they can increase productivity while doing business knowledge transfer to someone else.

Science and data-driven

Guntur said that knowledge and technology are important assets in developing the aquaculture industry. Technology development and research can be used to make data-driven decisions.

In the context of providing access to business capital, these assets can help platform aquatech to look at a number of indicators from aquaculture entrepreneurs, for example the risk of cultivation failure, operational performance, and productivity. These assets may not be owned by banks or financial institutions so that they do not understand the industry.

"We want to change the way aquaculture entrepreneurs make decisions that usually tend to be based on 'gut feeling' Becomes science and data-driven. It helps to translate it into the required form of technology."