Starting up an aquaponics farm in Africa: what are we learning?
We started our aquaponics farm, Silver Roots in 2023. We bought an existing business, and invested in branding, relationships building, and scaling production. We have been operating as Silver Roots for less than a year. What have we learned?
What have we done so far in year 1?
In our first six months, we concentrated on;
- Learning about aquaponics!
- Establishing a brand
- Building relationships with existing customers and expanding our customer base
- Building up our fish stock, so that we could increase productivity
- Planting more plants
- System improvements, like a new nanotechnology bioreactor
- Trying out different fruit and veg, to learn how we can best grow each one
- Testing demand for our brand and our individual products in different markets
We are just staring out (not even ten months in), and we are proud that we have validated demand for our produce, done accurate cost modelling, trained staff, and improved our infrastructure. We have increased our client base to 15 hotels, restaurants and supermarkets (double). We have tripled our workforce, and have a waitlist of clients!
Some early lessons we are learning
This is by no means our first business, though it is our first aquaponics farm. We are also one of only a handful of aquaponics farms in the country, so the knowledge network isn’t great and our lessons are very hard won.
Nutrient balance is a delicate business. “Your celery is too leafy!” our local juice bar told us: the nutrient and ph balance in our system wasn’t quite right and we were getting too much leaf. We adjusted until we could grow what he wanted. We had to experiment like this for lots of different plants: Garth’s tomatoes got a lot of attention this year. We also found out that rain was watering down the nutrients supplied to beds that weren’t under a sufficiently waterproof cover.
Fish don’t like to be cold. Cold fish don’t eat. If fish don’t eat, they don’t excrete. And no fish poo = no fertiliser for our plants. We are realising the impact of temperature on our fish and are working on affordable methods to raise the water temperature in the winter months to keep the fish eating.
You can sell the leaves separately. We tested whether it was better commercially to sell our fennel bulbs and leaves together and separately, given packaging costs and market demand. Did you know you can eat broccoli leaves? It’s like kale! No market for them yet, though we’re trying to get some restaurants on board. The diversity of our products has allowed us to “tell a better story” and provide a broader product range which in turn made us attractive to our newly acquired retail partners.
Being local matters. Our partners keep our business alive. Our personal relationships with many of the restaurant owners and supermarket managers helped us expand rapidly, and also reduce waste- because we could partner with local chefs to turn unsold or off season produce into lovely jams and soups. This is a win for both of us as their work also dries up at that time. We are just around the corner from many of our customers and spend a lot of time on the phone and helping each other out.
Being data driven doesn’t pay, unless you have AI. We spend a lot of time steeped in our data: how much does each seedling cost, how much is labour, how much is packaging, what does it sell for and where and when does it sell best? Sheelagh is pretty much a one woman show for this, and we run all the analytics on Excel. While our learning curve was particularly steep in our first six months, we do anticipate using data to drive our decision making in future. Unfortunately, the manual approach is really too time consuming.
Being a responsible employer is worth the cost. We employ 12 people, and we try to do right by them. Our decision to provide transport from their house to our farm costs us thousands of rand a month- one of the prime cost drivers! However, for us it is worth it to have staff that arrive safe, dry and energised. We also try to keep our team employed year round, which is unusual in Plettenberg Bay.
Profitability requires a certain scale. We have managed to employ more people and supply many more customers. However, we are yet to reach profitability. We have more demand than we can meet during the tourist season, so we buy from other aquaponics farms. We also buy seedlings from nurseries instead of growing them ourselves from seed. Even printing a run of branded labels costs more money than it would if we could buy in bulk. These are all driving up our costs. We are also at a somewhat awkward stage: we don’t have time to spend building better operational systems, because our teams’ workload is already too high, even though we need those systems to scale. However, with relatively small capital investment we could rapidly increase incomings, whilst only slightly increasing outgoings.
Tourist season is a double edged sword. It’s fantastic to have a six month long tourist season when everybody is in town, buying from the supermarkets and restaurants we supply. But it was hard to find a business model that let us flex during tourist season without being underutilised during the off season. We are currently looking into other ways to generate consistent cash flow. For example we could supply local, chemical free, high quality fertiliser to local farms and estates- many of whom are shocked at insane fertiliser prices. We are currently exploring combining commercial hop production with our current market offer, to see if this is a more viable long term business model.
It takes time to get a spick and span back end. When we first got the farm, we were shocked at the spaces staff had to work in to process and package the produce, and that there weren’t dedicated spaces for different tasks. We created a feed shed, compound shed, packing shed (complete with smart red and white paint) and a tool shed. This took so much time and energy that we simply hadn’t bargained for- though now it makes the farm much easier to run safely.
Solar isn’t as easy or cost-effective as we thought. We are currently off the grid 100%. We want to install a new bioreactor system for our Bio Tea Liquid Fertiliser (this is the stuff we can sell to farmers- basically we can make it for free using our fish waste). Unfortunately we can’t yet install it because it draws too much on our solar power system, and it costs way too much to use a petrol generator. We are hoping to find a financial solution to that problem- and think we might use gas for a few years until that product is more solar compatible.
What’s ahead of us?
We’re excited to test and learn new things for the rest of our first year. We will be experimenting with new crops, partnership and business models- including expanding our portfolio of secondary products. To date we have been self funded, so we are going to be testing the waters for investment, too, to see if partners can help us scale.
We are also investigating a home delivery scheme anchored with Silver Roots Farm produce and then including local products from our area- nuts, olive oil, unpasteurized cheeses, wine and flowers. So if you live in Plettenberg Bay, look out for that!
If you want to learn more about us, get in touch on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/silver-roots-aquaponically-grown-produce/
