Produced by One View Business.
Written by Xue Xiang.
Edited by Wooden Fish.
Do you often have an earthy smell of the fish you buy, and you are also worried about excessive heavy metals? If you want to eat a bite of fresh and clean fish, you need to have a very clean environment in which the fish grows.
However, in the current environment, it is obviously a bit difficult to meet this requirement with traditional breeding methods. Recently, Yilan Commercial has seen a new way to solve this problem in an ecological farm in Guangdong, and at the same time, it has also improved its breeding efficiency.
Use containers as fish ponds
When it comes to containers, in addition to loading goods for ocean transportation, we may think of container houses, but few people think of it as a pond for fish farming.
Stargazing Agriculture is an aquaculture enterprise in Dinghu District, Zhaoqing City, Guangdong Province, and they have 1,000 acres of ecological ponds, but not a single fish in them. At a glance, there are rows of modified green containers on top of many fish ponds, and the fish from the farm live in these rows of containers.
The relevant person in charge of Stargazing Agriculture told One View Business that all containers are 6 meters long and 2 meters wide4 meters, 2 meters high8 meters, the effective water volume is 25 cubic meters. When the fry grow up, a box can produce 5,000 catties to 10,000 catties of fish. At harvest time, there is no need for workers to catch fish with fishing nets, just open the circular gate on the side of the container, and the fish will break through the door, go directly into the urn, and then pack and ship to all parts of the country. 2-3 people can put 5,000 catties of fish in 10 minutes, while the traditional fishing efficiency is that 10 people can only catch 20,000 catties in a morning, and the fishing efficiency is greatly improved.
So, why raise fish in containers instead of ponds, and how does this differ from traditional farming?One View Business understands that the purpose of this "containerized farming" model is to raise cleaner, healthier and more nutritious fish.
First of all, in terms of taste, the mud of traditional ponds generally has geosmin in it, and the fish raised here are prone to fishy smell, which is what we call earthy smell.
Secondly, traditional aquaculture, which is to put fish in a large pond, can easily cause group diseases and thus die. If you want the fish not to get sick, you need medicine, but the use of medicine will cause food safety problems.
Now the containerized aquaculture will put different fish in different containers, which is equivalent to preparing three rooms and one living room for them, and the fish have their own space for eating and playing, which is called "zonal breeding and ectopic treatment" in aquaculture technology.
Their ponds are divided into different areas to form ecological ponds with different functions, with the largest area being used as a water source, from which the surface oxygen-rich water pumped out will flow into the breeding tank after sterilization, and the fish can always enjoy a steady stream of living water, keeping the geosmin out.
The aquaculture tail water discharged from the container will flow through a number of ecological ponds with different functions in turn, each pond will degrade a part of the waste, and finally more than 90% of the solid pollutants will be disposed of, so that the aquaculture water meets the standard and can be recycled.
Of course, One View Business has learned that in addition to the fact that these fish do not have a "fishy smell", the fish in the container can also maintain the elasticity of the meat because of a steady stream of live water and customized green feed.
It is reported that there are as many as 16 types of green feed for these fish, and they are all fish food certified by green food, and it is precisely because of this that these fish have obtained the national green food identity certification. The certification standards of this green fish are higher than those of the European Union, the United States, and the CAC, and can be mutually recognized with the European Union.
Fish from the south to the north
With good fish, how to better reach consumers is also the key.
Shu Rui, chairman of Stargazing Agriculture, told Yilan Business that the products of this ecological pond are mainly used to determine the amount of breeding in a period of time through the "order breeding" model, and are not randomly produced and sold.
A year ago, Liu Shengbing, director of Hema Seafood and Aquatic Products Purchasing, led his team to find good products in the "Green Fish" series of Stargazing Agriculture when he visited all parts of the country, and then the two sides quickly cooperated, and on December 27, 2023, the Stargazing Agriculture Digital Fishery Breeding Base was officially listed as a green fish Hema Village, and Hema became the main sales channel for these fish.
However, the cooperation has not been smooth sailing, as it is well known that "freshness" is an important criterion for the selection of ingredients and the preparation of food by Chinese residents, especially aquatic products, and consumers are more likely to prefer live fish than frozen fish. In the beginning, it was not easy to transport these fish to other places, from the south to the north.
Taking Beijing as an example, Liu Shengbing, director of Hema Seafood Aquatic Products Purchasing, said that we had a headache in the face of 2,000 kilometers of logistics, and we just tried to find an outsourced waterwheel logistics provider.
Later, the procurement team came to Zhaoqing, Guangdong, and took a freight water truck all the way north, recording the water change time, oxygen, vitality and other indicators, and finally found the problem in the loading density and temperature, "because the rainbow bream is a tropical fish, it will be hard if it is less than 20, and the winter in Beijing is extremely cold."
After months of experimentation, they finally opened up this special fresh link and implemented single-tank monoculture for delicate green fish, increasing the survival rate to 95%. After opening up Beijing, Hema also began to replicate the green fish ** chain to other cities, covering East China in June, Central China in July, Southwest China in August, and the whole country in October. At present, these "green fish" have vigorously "swam" into more than 20 cities across the country, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, Chengdu, and more than 300 Hema stores.
The efforts and dedication behind it have also been recognized by Hema users. According to Hema data, although it has only been on the market for more than one month in China, "Green Fish" has achieved daily sales of 10,000 fish, accounting for about 15% of the total fish sales.
As for the first time, One View Business understands that Hema and the aquaculture party are currently using the method of "talking once a year", and the overall direction is to maintain the closeness to ordinary citizens by further optimizing the cost of breeding and transportation links. This also coincides with Freshippo's "low-price strategy" in 2023 and even in the next few years.
From the perspective of the path, the model of Hema in aquatic products is very similar to that of agricultural products and flowers, which is to test the water first, integrate the upstream and downstream to formulate industry-leading standards after the results, and then dig deep into the product line according to customer needs to avoid homogeneous competition with peers. The direct supply at the source removes the intermediate price increase, and also occupies a certain advantage in the first place. From the current point of view, this set of play is effective.
As Zhai Tianchang of the Institute of Rural Development of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said, "Hema uses its own advantages to integrate the first chain and realize the 'one-merchant operation' from the production end to the retail end, reducing the transaction costs generated by the participation of middlemen and improving the efficiency." It has realized the Pareto improvement of the welfare of producers and consumers, and better met the people's aquatic consumption needs while pursuing the development of the industry. ”