SeaArk Africa has signed a multimillion-rand deal to export its proprietary prawn farming IT and bio intellectual property (IP) to China.
The deal was signed at the company's research centre at Coega, just outside Port Elizabeth, yesterday.
SeaArk Africa is a bio-farming joint venture in the stable of the unlisted Bosasa group.
The research centre is also the kernel of a R9.2 billion closed system biosecure prawn aquafarm that will employ 11 800 people directly by 2014 and 88 000 indirectly. The farm will produce 20 000 tons of crustaceans a year - mostly for export to the US, Japan and Europe.
SeaArk CEO Gavin Watson says IT is critical to the project. "We've taken the science and put it into the software," he says. "All the IT is Web-based so you can access it anywhere in the world. It is prawn farming for dummies."
This means scientists at Coega will be able to monitor operations in China in real-time and intervene if necessary. "This is vital because if something goes wrong and you have to fly the scientists there, the prawns will be dead by the time they arrive," Watson emphasises.
The workflow, business intelligence and management software in use at Coega - and soon to be in China - was largely developed in-house by Sondolo IT, another Bosasa subsidiary, and cost about R35 million.
SeaArk president David Wills says the bio-technology deployed at the farm was developed in America at a cost of $40 million, subsidised by the US Department of Agriculture.
Wills adds it took 15 years to get the technique right, but it now allows the company to grow prawns at twice the weekly growth rate as the rest of the prawn farming industry and at a much better yield. "The competitive advantage is just off the charts. It takes farming to a whole new level of science and IT."
The secret is...
Software developer William Brander says the secret to its success is data. All the vital statistics are monitored, especially biosecurity, water quality, temperature and nutrition. "It is essentially a workflow management system that is structured around the life cycle of the prawn. It takes care of your maintenance, and is basically an end-to-end logistics system on the management side.
"Everything has been designed using a modular approach and services-oriented architecture. The biggest challenge we had was bandwidth. We needed to find a way of getting all the data from China and then sending it back. The available bandwidth doesn't support that too well. We have a very rich display, so what we've done is implement Microsoft Silverlite to carry data across multiple Web services and collate it so you can make the appropriate comparisons and management decisions."
Meanwhile, in China
Wills and Watson say the Chinese facility will be built under the supervision of BuildAll, a further Bosasa subsidiary. BuildAll will deploy a permanent team of four project managers, while Sondolo will deploy software engineers for the duration of the construction of the plant at Zhanjiang.
Supported by architects, plumbers, electrical, civil, and software engineers on a rotational basis, the team will ensure the Chinese facility is built to the exact tolerances and specifications developed in Coega during the pilot phase.
"The construction has to be exact for SeaArk's science to work," says Arthur Kotzen, chairman of BuildAll. "Sometimes it is literally a matter of millimetres - the ponds have to be done in a precise way for the operating systems to work."
Wills says SeaArk is also in talks with partners in Saudi Arabia and Mozambique. If farms are established there, they will also be remotely monitored from the Coega control centre.
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