XpertSea developed a new app that lets shrimp farmers use their smartphones to capture accurate animal data and track growth from stocking through harvest.
The app builds on the success of the XperCount, a connected “smart bucket” that lets farmers count, size, weigh and image animal samples in seconds. After months of research and in-field testing, XpertSea engineers reduced the 5 kg of hardware to a feature-enhanced app that runs on a shrimp farmer’s Android or iPhone.
“Too many shrimp farmers operate without the benefit of accurate, standardized data and this hinders their operations and hurts their bottom line,” said Valerie Robitaille, CEO and co-founder of XpertSea. “We wanted to create an easily accessible, ultra-portable tool that would make data collection fast, easy and reliable so that any farmer can unlock better crops and financial outcomes. With our mobile app, farmers of any size and means can use their phone to monitor pond growth and make better decisions, which improves profitability and sustainability.”
With the app and a picture of their shrimp, farmers gain instant, easy access to transparent and reliable information such as average body weight, growth rate and weight distribution. This enables them to adjust feeding regimes, identify anomalies in animal growth and make better decisions on how to grow their crops and transact business.
“XpertSea’s innovative smartphone app saves a huge amount of time and generates very accurate sampling data. This enables precise measurements of the size and frequency distribution of the population to be made more often," said Craig Browdy, director of Research & Development at Zeigler Bros., a provider of premium feeds that has been collaborating with XpertSea on the development of the app. “The app provides a combination of powerful growth and feeding models driven by AI, and the ability to share and exchange information from pondside to management and expertise anywhere in the world in real-time. This is a powerful tool for improving day-to-day decision-making yielding faster growth, more efficient feed conversion and better water quality.”
“Using the app to measure shrimp growth is very useful,” said Nguyen Van Teo, a manager of a high-tech farm in the Bac-Lieu cooperative in Vietnam. “The number of samples taken is higher, faster and more accurate than conventional manual shrimp sampling. Shrimp are healthy when sampled, free from injury and the data is stored and managed on a real-time online database.”
The app is currently available on the Google Play and Apple Store for all farmers in Ecuador and farmers working with XpertSea’s enterprise partners across the world.
