Environmental Intelligence Across Aquaculture: A Look at Our Macroalgae Project in Tanzania

BiOceanOr’s expertise reaches across the full diversity of aquaculture, from finfish to shellfish and macroalgae. For the past year, BiOceanOr has been running an R&D project in Tanzania to help make macroalgae farming more sustainable and more predictable.

On this project, BiOceanOr partnered with C-weed Mwani, a local seaweed producer in Tanzania, and Cargill, a global food and agriculture company and the project’s sponsor. Cargill purchases the dried algae to extract carrageenan, a natural compound valued across the food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries for its gelling, thickening and stabilizing properties.

Knowing What Drives Growth

The objective is to help C-weed Mwani better understand the environmental variables affecting their production, whether they support stronger growth or, on the contrary, lead to suboptimal harvests. As in every sector BiOceanOr works in, this starts with the fundamentals of water quality and local climatology:

With high-frequency data collection, BiOceanOr helps turn raw environmental signals into data-driven insights, so C-weed Mwani can optimize their production with a solid evidence base.

The expected benefits are numerous:

Where Fieldwork Meets Data Insights

On the field, BiOceanOr deployed three environmental stations at C-weed Mwani’s site. With high-quality, continuous data flowing in, BiOceanOr worked alongside C-weed Mwani and Cargill to understand the correlations affecting performance and quantifying which environmental factors weighed most heavily on production, cross-referenced against the farm’s own production data.

Turning Insights Into Action

Thanks to this project, C-weed Mwani and Cargill now have a clearer, data-backed picture of what drives their production. These insights will:

BiOceanOr runs several similar R&D projects around the world. Wherever the location, the approach stays the same: