Opportunity for

• Impact investors (VC’s, family offices, angels) looking to invest in technology that has the ability to revolutionise the food production industry. 
  ^This opportunity is only for professional and sophisticated investors.

Opportunity description

Industry challenge:

The UN states that the world needs to produce 50% more food by 2050 in order to meet the world’s growing demands. Viable farmland and water resources are scarce, and protein production through aquaculture has significant environmental and quality issues, limiting the ability to meet these needs. The food production industry needs to make significant leaps in a short period of time, which cannot be achieved through current farming practices.

Current soilless agriculture and recirculating aquaculture face significant challenges in scaling, be it limited available skilled labour, controlled environments, technical knowledge, varieties of crops, waste, or fish health. These issues have and will prevent these industries from being able to meet this increased demand for production, and there needs to be a more scalable, sustainable method of food production that existing primary producers can adopt.

Current opportunity:

EcoSystem Farms is seeking investment to demonstrate our technology at hectare scale, and in weather and land conditions that align with our initial target market, regional farmers. The existing technology that enables aquaponics at a commercial level is a combination of two technologies – recirculating aquaculture and hydroponics but faces all the same problems. Our setup has many significant benefits in comparison to these systems, which we have demonstrated through consistent operations over the past 4 years.

Over the past four years EcoSystem Farms has:

• Demonstrated our technology and patented invention works at scale.
• Bootstrapped to develop and build the largest integrated aquaponics farm in Australia.
• Demonstrated the ability to grow a vast variety of plant crops, from herbs to orchard treed.
• Grown over 12,000 trout and 6000 gold perch – some weighing up to 1.4kg per fish.
• Built an additional test site in Renmark, South Australia, focussing on long term, warm weather crops.
• Participated in numerous incubators and competitions including: Farmers2Founders, ThincLab, Climate KIC ClimateLaunchpad, ImpactX Shift!, PIRSA Agtech Hub, and others.

Opportunity background:

We have developed a sustainable farming setup, integrating production of both plants and fish, that has extremely low water use (1mgL/H/year), requires no soil, no chemical fertilisers, no pesticides, can grow a vast variety of crops from herbs to orchard trees, and can utilise tractors at scale. The setup enables aquaculture operations that require no water changes leading to significant improvements in water quality and fish health compared to recirculating aquaculture. We have a patented the key part of the technology that enables our system to be operated at scale, having rigorously tested it for over 1 million cycles. The setup is low tech, robust, and remote monitoring and automated controls will enable mass adoption without users having a background in aquaculture. Not only is our product unique compared to available technology on the market, our business model also aims to rapidly scale through making our technology available to farmers (through an initial sale and then subscription/support model)– not just operate our own farms. In doing go, we aim to address the predicted food shortages at scale by helping primary producers grow more food on their land.

Potential other application:

The setup can be used for a very wide range of crops from herbs, field crops, through to vineyards and orchards. It can grow a huge variety of fresh water fish, from murray cod and barramundi to trout or salmon depending on temperature conditions. The system at heart is a waste management platform that can take liquid ammonia and convert it into plants and clean water so there are opportunities for stock waste management in dairies, feedlots, piggeries, or chicken farms to deal with waste and create high value on site feed.