From eggs to plate: Eco-Ark keeps alive the dream of sustainable fish farming

Can sustainable seafood produced by innovative technology satisfy Singaporeans' taste for fresh and quality seafood? This case study shows what an innovative closed-system fish farm is doing to stay the course

By the SMU Corporate Communications team

30 Aug 2024

Imagine your dinner plate teeming with delicious barramundi, snapper, and grouper reared from the time they were hatched in a neat closed-loop system of fish farming.

This is how the fish farm 'Eco-Ark' operates. It uses an innovative floating closed system to farm fish in the sea sustainably and boost Singapore's food security and self-sufficiency.

Eco-Ark, set up under Aquaculture Centre of Excellence (ACE), is led by CEO Leow Ban Tat. It runs on Leow's patented technologies - combining offshore, marine, and recirculating aquaculture technologies - which keep its fish safe from pollutants and other environmental threats in the open sea.

The rise of aquaculture in Singapore

Over the past 60 years, the demand for seafood has led to the rise of aquaculture - the farming of fish and seafood in coastal waters and open oceans. Once regarded as a solution to overfishing, aquaculture's growth on an industrial scale has fuelled environmental problems. These include overfishing of wild fish to feed farmed carnivore species; pollution from the discharge of waste, antibiotics, and fish feed into the marine ecosystem; and infecting wild fish with diseases and parasites.

Nonetheless, as Singapore's over-dependence on international food sources spurred the government to 'grow local' to achieve self-sufficiency and food security, the number of local food farms grew to 265, including 136 fish farms, between 2019 and 2021. Seminal events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war led the government to ramp up sea space tenders, encouraging farmers to produce more - particularly given Singaporeans' love for seafood. Their consumption of seafood on a per capita basis is 22 kg a year, compared with the global average of 20.5 kg.

A container system and integrated system 'from eggs to plate'

The idea of Eco-Ark was conceived when algal blooms in Singapore waters had caused the wide destruction of both farmed fish and wild fish in 2014 and 2015. Leow wondered if this could be an opportunity to start a new kind of aquaculture where fish is farmed in a controlled environment in the sea, protected from algal blooms and more.

Having spent some 33 years in the shipping industry, with considerable engineering expertise in constructing floating structures, Leow set up ACE in 2017 and designed Eco-Ark, a buoyant structure for fish farming. In 2018, he patented it as a novel offshore advanced hull system (NOAHS).

The system comprises a closed container fish farm, essentially a semi-submersible structure with four large cultivating tanks. The fish are grown in a controlled environment in the tanks, protected from external aquatic factors, including variations in temperature and oxygen, pollutants, and algal bloom outbreaks.

The farm also filters and ozonates the sea water for use to rear the fish, hence eliminating the need to use vaccines and antibiotics as practised by traditional cage farms. The wastewater is also ozonated, making it safe to be discharged back into the sea.

Finally, the pumps used by the farm are designed to be more energy-efficient compared to conventional aquaculture farms. Leow also uses solar energy to power some of the pumps.

After Leow managed to secure funding for NOAHS in early 2019, and began operations, two events prompted him to finetune his business model. First, the pandemic resulted in disrupted supplies of fingerlings, so Leow launched a hatchery to hatch fish eggs sourced from local farms. Second, as he could not access cost-effective processing facilities that could gut, clean and package harvested fish for sale, he set up his own food processing facility on Eco-Ark in 2020.

As a result, Leow's fish farm is a one-stop shop that controls the production of fish from the egg stage to the sale of ready-to-eat fish. It sells 90% of its stock via ACE's online shop, and 60% of its total sales are to hotels and restaurants.

Future outlook

Leow hopes to make Eco-Ark entirely self-sufficient by maintaining brood fish for egg production. He is also looking at launching two more Eco-Arks to raise production to over 500 tonnes annually, and internationalise the farm's technology and expertise.

The promise of clean, sustainable production has been delivered but does it sell? Despite government support, fish from Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand is 20 per cent cheaper, leading to lower demand for Eco-Ark's fish from local supermarkets and consumers. ACE barely manages to cover its costs with its current pricing. "In a business, you survive by the price, you die by the price," said Leow. "If you can't cover your costs, then you can't survive."

While Leow is committed to sustainability and convinced of his breakthrough technology, he wonders how long Eco-Ark can sustain its operations in light of slow sales and aggressive competition from the region.

This case study "ACE in Singapore: Floating fish farm for food security and sustainability" was written by Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Human Resources (Education) Thomas Menkhoff, Adjunct Teaching Mentor Dr Kevin Cheong, and Dr Sheetal Mittal at the Singapore Management University. For further details on the case, please visit the CMP website by clicking here