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I'm your host, Elise Hugh.
Fish is nutritious and part of a fast -growing food system.
Also, if I may add, delicious.
But feeding the fish of the world costs farmers a lot of money and resources.
Aquaculture tech entrepreneur Gibran Huzaifa came up with a solution for this.
In his 2024 talk, he explains how a technological solution led to a much healthier ecosystem for fish and farmers.
It is followed by a brief Q &A with head of TED, Chris Anderson.
All of that is coming up.
So my time in university changed my life.
But not the way you might think.
There are two life -changing experiences when I was there.
The first one is actually when I got it.
So when I was accepted in Bandung Institute of Technology around 2007, my family had financial problems.
I moved to a new city when I didn't have any friends and relatives.
I ran out of money, slept in a mosque and at some point went three straight days without eating.
I felt so hungry. I had experienced hunger before, but never like this.
My head felt dizzy.
My vision was blurry.
I couldn't stand up.
So I only laid down in the mosque, looked up at the ceiling and said, this might be it.
This could be it. This is the end of my life.
But I thought since I was in the mosque if I died there, I would go straight to heaven.
But luckily, someone gave me money to eat.
So I survived. The morning after, still in the mosque, I read in the paper that a man found death because of starfish.
Somebody just like me in Indonesia, which is known as a research -rich country, I cried my eyes out, imagining him feeling the hunger pain that I felt just last night, but he had to endure it until the second he died.
Throughout that experience, I found my life purpose.
I want to solve hunger problems.
The second experience was when I got into a class.
So I was a biology major, and there was this optional class called aquaculture.
It was one of the most popular class in my uni, almost as popular as computer science 101.
But not because everyone was interested about aquaculture, but because it was guaranteed to get an A.
You just had to show up.
Now I'd love to tell you that I took the class because I saw it as a tool to eliminate hunger, but no, I had my own noble cause to improve my GPA.
However, exactly after that class, I was convinced that aquaculture is the future of food production.
Fish is the most resource -efficient of our farm animals and the most nutritious.
Aquaculture itself as a sector is the fastest growing food system globally, with major growth still ahead of it.
And currently, the seafood that we consume globally, only slightly higher than 50 % come from the farms.
The rest is still hunted from the ocean, where we're actually taking more than the ocean can handle.
But if we learn from history, humanity will transition from hunters to farmers.
I was so inspired by that class, especially after the last statement.
Exactly after the course, I decided to be a farmer myself.
So I rented out a small catfish pond for $20 a year and then grew it out from one pond in 2010 to 76 ponds when I graduated in 2012.
But my dream was to have a thousand ponds.
That's why I learned from many farmers that operate and own hundreds of ponds just to learn from them how they grow the business.
But surprisingly, from that discussion, I learned that all farmers face the same problems.
Feed cost is 70 % and 90 % of the total cost.
And it's done manually by labor.
So sometimes the labor forget to feed the fish.
The other times, they steal the feed and sell it to the other farm.
And for the most part, they over -fit the fish and create pollution to the water.
I was a farmer myself, so I knew the problem pretty well.
But knowing that all farmers face exactly the same challenges was quite eye -opening.
So it got me an idea to think that it was an opportunity.
So I threw out an idea to one of the farmers.
Hey, what if I can solve this?
What if I can build a machine that you can feed the fish automatically from your phone?
Would you like that?
And his answer changed everything because he said that if it existed, each of my ponds will use your product.
And it struck me, because in Indonesia, there are more than 3 million fish and shrimp farmers.
And more than 10 million ponds all across the country.
Imagine if those millions of farmers, then we can build a technology that can be used by all.
It would be massive, right?
And especially because back then, technology like that was very little and almost nonexistent in Indonesia.
Because the ponds are murky with no feasibility on what's going on in the pond.
And most of the fish and shrimp farms are in Asia and are small holders.
And those small holders were struggling financially, stressed out, highly dependent on middlemen with no real power to change things.
So I thought that technology might be able to solve this.
So I really wanted to start a tech company.
The first thing I did to start a tech company, which is very scientific and productive, was to ask a friend to borrow his garage.
Because I learned that all successful tech companies started from a garage.
So that's the mandatory next step to start a tech company.
And there I was, in a garage, building an automatic feeding machine from a secondhand aluminum tank and used CD -ROM only for $200 in two months.
It was nothing fancy.
Because using SMS, the phone was still a black barrier.
Using SMS and sensor data, that sends SMS and then the machine was active.
It was pretty simple.
I proudly bring this crappy prototype to a farmer.
And the first thing that he said, is it looks so ugly, right?
Why is it look so ugly?
It's still prototype.
But try it out. But he was intrigued.
Because this technology never existed before.
And I took another farmer, and then he was intrigued as well.
But they didn't want to use it because it's using text base.
They didn't want to send hundreds of texts per day just to feed the fish.
So I knew that I needed to change the architecture of the system.
It was around the same time where the internet was starting to take off Indonesia.
So all of the e -commerce, ride hailing and FinTech were striving.
So I got an idea, what if I can put internet on the machine and then build internet business on top of it?
And I was sold. I sold my fish farms.
Found a technical co -founder.
And started a fish tech business I named Efishery.
So I redesigned the product itself to look prettier.
But to be a bit more durable.
And I connected to a sensor that can sense the epithet of the fish and stop the feeding when they're already full.
Based on the movement, when they're hungry they tend to be aggressive.
When they're full, they tend to be calmer, just like us in a way.
So with that sensors, I connected to a mobile app and sent the data to the cloud.
It was much better product than it started.
But farmers still didn't want to adopt it because it needed to be radically affordable to sell it to the smallholder farmers.
Then I changed the model to subscription.
And it works. Farmers use it.
Their feeding cost is more efficient.
They shorten the harvest cycle, grow more, better quality of fish and healthier fish.
And it grew from only 10 farmer and 10 pond in our first year in 2013 to currently we have more than 200 ,000 farmers and 400 ,000 ponds connected to the platform.
Applause Once we reached a certain scale, the magic started rolling.
With more farm data, we could consolidate volume from farmers and bypass the middleman.
We solved supply chain disadvantages for smallholders through a platform that enabled them to purchase affordable feed, receive formal financing, and sends the produce directly to the buyers.
What started as a feeder, now it evolves to a solution that's similar like a cooperative, but where farmers are digitally connected, giving small scale farmers the rights and purchasing power of the big guys.
We've expanded to India and soon will be another country commercially.
So we're becoming a fully integrated model, just similar like big conglomerates in other industries.
But it's not one family who gets everything.
No, success, access and control are equally distributed amongst hundreds of thousands of farmers.
We're currently the largest feed distributor and fish suppliers in the country without owning and operating any single pond, just surfing the farmers.
There are many big environmental, economic and social wins with eliminating feed waste, which otherwise would cause pollution degradation and disease.
The data itself brings transparency and traceability to the supply chain, and farmers double their income.
I remember one of the farmer, Tilapia farmer from Java, who never graduated from primary school, couldn't read well, had been doing fish farming for two decades, only managing two ponds for 20 years before joining a fishery.
Right now, he's managing six times more ponds, 10 times more income, simply by joining a fishery four years ago.
And because of that, he could take his two daughters to graduate from top tech universities in Indonesia.
And what amazed me is that those two daughters took over the business and grew the business by 20 times.
So the impact was generational, and we have tens of thousands of stories like this.
But we realized that for this impact to be long -lasting, the farmers need to benefit from the system redesign.
That's why we hope to extend our cooperative model to ownership in the business.
So when we go public, and hopefully the stock rises, the wealth created will be distributed to farmers as well.
And we all know that the tech stocks have been successfully, effectively one of the ways to create wealth, but mostly for feces, founders and early employees.
But now it has a chance to create new thousands of fish farmer millionaires who used to be smallholders.
And that's how we truly redistribute wealth and change the way many see the opportunities and their own potential, which is really necessary to get to a healthy planet and thrive in humanity.
It's widely exciting that we got here, but one in nine of us still goes to bed hungry, and it reminded me of myself, because I went to bed hungry for days.
So that's why we're taking this cooperative model to ask the bliss communities in the area where hunger issues are apparent.
So the farmers can strive, but the communities and households around them will get access to affordable protein, which eventually will help reduce hunger in that area.
We're just getting started, but still a lot of work ahead.
Over the past 17 years, I've even thought about a guy who died from starvation that night.
I was lucky enough that I survived, which led me on a path to solve hunger problems through systemic change on the food production.
I wonder what he would have achieved had he lived.
If it weren't for the small money that somebody gave me to eat or the simple inspiration that my professors shared in the class, I wouldn't be doing what I do today.
Everything is consequential.
However small our deeds, as long as we stick to the good intentions and progressive action, we can build an imaginably better future.
Thank you. This is such an inspiring story.
I've been thinking a lot about infectious generosity, and it just strikes me this is one of the best examples ever of it.
The person... Who was this person and what did they actually give you?
Who saved your life?
Just money for me to...
So it's just like a dollar or something like this.
Like two dollars. A couple of dollars.
You've never seen them again?
Never seen them again.
If you could know that that two -dollar gift not only saved your life but actually has eased hunger for, I guess, literally millions of people.
If you look at the people who your aquaculture farmers are supplying.
What an amazing thing.
So look, there's a lot of people here who are entrepreneurs of different kinds.
Business entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, or maybe they are thinking about it.
It is a hard road to go on.
What would you say to someone who right now is just...
They want to do something and they're struggling?
What would you say?
Yeah, I think one of my most favorite TED talk ever is from Simon Sainake.
You need to start with why.
And I watched it during my time in college.
And I was lucky enough that during those tragedies, I found my why to solve hunger problems.
So when my company was in the edge of bankruptcy, I always remember, well, I can't stop here.
I haven't even pushed through to actually solve hunger problems.
So I think start with why, and then the universe will help you to show the road.
Gibran, thank you so much.
Thank you. It was incredible.
That was Gibran Huzayfah, speaking at TED 2024.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED .com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This episode was produced and edited by our team.
Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Alejandra Salazar.
It was mixed by Christopher Faizi -Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Toppner and Daniela Valarezo.
I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
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