Billions of
people worldwide depend on fisheries and aquaculture for food, which provides
NATURE’S SUPER FOOD with essential nutrients. Population growth is accompanied
by increasing demand for fish and other seafood, as the food and nutritional
needs are not likely to be satisfied by agricultural development alone. The
challenges faced by coastal communities who are mainly dependent on wild
fishing is climatic change due to global warming such as ocean acidification,
increase in sea-level etc. with a decrease in fish biomass, changes in fish spawning
etc. The estimates have shown that there is 31.4% fish stock as
overfished-“fished at biologically unsustainable level.
Hence aquaculture is the fastest growing
food-producing sector in the world to make up for the shortfall in wild
fisheries, and its socio-economic role in providing livelihood opportunities
and economic security, particularly for the less-developed regions of the
world. Some 200 million people and their dependants worldwide, especially in
coastal areas live by fishing and aquaculture. The success of aqua farming is measured by its
rate of return on investment which depends on capital investment, market price,
production cost, and increase yield.
The
existing problems are pollution,
habitat degradation, harmful practices, indiscriminate use of antibiotics and
chemicals, due to which aquaculture sector is under stress. Apart from these
the major problems faced by the industry are availability
of necessary uninterrupted power, lack of integration of dissolved oxygen
sensors etc, which leads to unnecessary operational time of aeration systems
leading to detrimental effects on the crop produce. The unskilled farmers
choose increased use of antibiotics and chemicals to compensate for the low
quality and /or oxygen content of water bodies used for the crop production.
Power plays a vital role in the
aquaculture, especially for changing the water every week after 60 days, for
oxygenation and better harvest. As 40% of the production cost of
aquaculture especially shrimp culture is due to energy consumption, we are
providing cost effective, easily affordable, available Nano Energy
Efficient Motors (NEEM) based energy saving aeration systems
which reduces the power consumption by almost 40%.
The temperature, salinity and pressure hold
differing amounts of oxygen and other gases. The dissolved oxygen (DO) and
aeration is an important factor for the success of the aquaculture. DO of about
5 mg/litre is found to be optimum for the shrimp growth, between 1-4 mg/l the
shrimps exhibit poor growth and less than 1 mg/l they die. Similarly water
super saturated with oxygen causes GAS BUBBLE disease. Hence the quality of water bodies i.e., dissolved
oxygen (DO), Ph, total organic carbon (TOC) in water ecosystem plays an important role in
harvest which can be detected by integrated detection systems and monitored by
cloud based software.
