What is the name of your organization?
Rongbient Biotech Company Limited
What is the name of your solution?
Rongbient Biotech
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Seaweed based agriculture inputs that double farmers' profit
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
Viet Nam
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Globally, feed & farming additives accounted to over 50% the cost (>$600B/y) & over 50% the emission (6-8Gts/y) in animal farming. Rongbient started with shrimp farming in Vietnam - 2nd largest shrimp producer in the world - where farmers face:
➔ High cost: production costs $5/kg vs $2.5/kg in Ecuador, 50-70% in feed cost and 20-30% in farming additives trying to keep the shrimps healthy.
➔ High risk: disease outbreaks cause massive financial loss, no early disease detection, disease prevention has mostly been antibiotics.
➔ Unsustainable practice: over 5B m3 of wastewater from non-industrialized shrimp farming ends up in the ocean a year (3X the freshwater use of the US), every ton of shrimp production in industrialized shrimp farming generated 14 tons of GHG emission footprint (45% from feed production alone).
What is your solution?
Rongbient makes fermented seaweed feed supplement (formed like feed, worked like farming additives) that replaces 5% the conventional feed in industrialized shrimp farming to:
➔ Boost shrimp immunity, prevent diseases, increase survival rate from 67% to 80-90%.
➔ Improve shrimp gut health, reduce 10-20% feed & up to 50% farming additives use, remove antibiotic completely.
➔ Mitigate up to 75 tons of GHG emission footprint/ha/year from feed & farming additives.
We bio-process seaweed to remove pigment & pollutants, lactic acid ferment 3 red seaweed species with Lactobacillus Plantarum, then pelletize in a balance formulation.
Since growing our own seaweed is unscalable; to secure supply, we built and rent out seaweed bio-filtration systems that float on top of non-industrialized shrimp farms in a co-culture model. The seaweed absorbs excess nutrients, and feed the shrimp in return, and:
➔ Increase survival rate from 33% to 50%
➔ Double farmers' income with seaweed harvest.
➔ Purify 10k m3 of wastewater/ha/year.
We run tissue culture 24/7 in a lab to reproduce seaweed 5X faster, coat it on floating systems of HDPE pipes & PP line/net which is 20% the cost of current models. Also no limitation of land-use or heavy farming operation cost.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
1. Feed supplement: industrialized (intensive) shrimp farmers who use feed on a daily basic, stocking density at 100-200 pcs/sqm, applied technologies intensively like oxygen generator/filtration/protein skimmer. They harvest from 4 tons/ha/year, to up to 60-150 tons/ha/year. Most owns min 2ha of farms, average 5ha.
Our feed supplement helps them boost yield with higher survival rate (up to 90%), better immunity and growth rate; as well as double their profit by reducing about 1/3 the costs.
2. Bio-filtration system: serve non-industrialized (extensive) shrimp farmers who use no feed, no technologies, stocking density of 1-5 pcs/sqm. They releases post larvae (baby shrimps) quarterly, harvest bi-weekly at low tides. No water filtrations, water exchange run daily using nearby river branches. Because of all this, the shrimp waste accumulated over the years and degrade the ponds, and they only harvest average 250kg/ha/year. Farmers then move on, cut down mangrove/tidal marsh to create new ponds, causing deforestation and land-use degradation.
Our bio-filtration boosts shrimp yield by providing natural food for shrimp, consuming excess nutrients in water for cleaner water, increasing survival rate from 33% to 50%. Plus farmers add additional income on seaweed harvest (>100% current income)
