Gibran El Farizy, a student at the Bandung Institute of Technology in West Java in Indonesia, established eFishery, an Indonesian startup aimed at making fish farming more efficient, and, crucially, more productive. He founded the company, which primarily produces automatic fish-feeding machines, in 2013.

The device allows fish and shrimp farmers to schedule feeding times through a monitoring app on their smartphones. For example, a farmer could release 150 grams of feed at 7 a.m., 50 grams at 3 p.m., and 100 grams at 11 p.m., and the motorized feeder will disperse the food pellets evenly across a fish pond.

The feeder, which can cover ponds of up to 100 square meters, is sold in two sizes. The 12kg container costs 6.7 million rupiah ($490), and a 65kg container is priced at 7.9 million rupiah, including the charge for the monitoring software. EFishery also offers a rental option for 300,000 rupiah a month.

\"[The autofeeder] is good,\" said Petrus Rumambi Gumantio, who has been farming catfish for the past seven years, aside from his job as a low-rank civil servant in Lampung province. He uses six small ponds in the backyard of his home to harvest the fish, and he said the process usually took three to four months. Since he began using eFishery\'s feeder less than a year ago, Gumantio has been able to use less feed -- 700kg from the previous 1 ton -- and he said it now takes less time to harvest the catfish.

\"I only had to arrange [the feeding times and volumes] using a smartphone once, and now I don\'t have to rush home from the office every time to feed [the fish],\" he said.

The company is currently developing an in-pond sensor, which it hopes to release before the end of this year, which will track how hungry the fish are by their movement and the ripples in the water. 

Source: Nikei Asian Review // Original Article