What we can and cannot tell you about the payback on one container

This post publishes no payback period. The purchase price and the royalty are contracted, and both are printed below. Output, operating cost and the retail price are not measured, and those three are what a payback period is made of.

What follows is the structure of the economics, the numbers that have a document behind them, and a plain list of the inputs that do not. An operator can build the rest once the missing inputs exist, and the calculator will not compute a result until you supply them.

The terms with a document behind them

A 40ft container is USD 350,000 outright. The 20ft is USD 175,000 and the 10ft is USD 90,000. These come from the company’s locked commercial register, read from the pitch deck at slide 09 and confirmed at slide 15. The signed purchase and supply agreement is not yet in our evidence file, so these rest on that register rather than on a clause a buyer can re-read. Getting the executed document is an open request.

Royalty is USD 2 per litre of fertilizer produced for sale or use, on the purchase path and the lease path alike. There is no royalty on fish. The rate does not change with the ownership model.

Lease terms are quoted on application. Three sets of lease terms are on file and they do not reconcile. Until one governing signed document exists, no lease number publishes here.

The figures that come from the design

Fish planning volume is 20,000 kg a year from a 40ft unit, four harvests of about five tonnes, from deck slide 07. It is a planning figure, not a harvest record. No metered annual harvest exists yet.

The season application programme is 15 to 25 litres per hectare, with a cap of 30 where fertigation events follow, from the FishIt integration guide, section 1. So one 30 litre container treats roughly one hectare for a season. That guide is a customer integration memo, not a trial.

What is not measured

These four gaps are the reason this post has no bottom line.

Operating cost per litre. The base-case derivation in circulation gives about USD 0.77 per litre, but it rests on a constant of 140,000 that nobody has been able to source. It prints as pending, not as fact. The opex line needs itemizing into feed, labour, energy, consumables and maintenance, each with a per-market price the operator fills in.

Retail price. The pitch deck and this site have carried two different bands, roughly a factor apart at the top end. Two documents, two answers, so pricing is on application until one governing band is confirmed in writing.

Fish revenue. At the 20,000 kg planning figure, the revenue depends entirely on the channel and the local market, and we have not published a metered operating cost to set against it. We do not claim that the fish carry the container.

The two conclusions we will publish

Input substitution does not pay for this programme on any supply route, owned containers included. Take the arithmetic seriously. A litre of the ferment carries about 0.42 g of nitrogen (NviroTek report S26/3362, page 1 of 2). A season programme of 15 to 25 litres per hectare therefore delivers something on the order of 10 grams of nitrogen to a hectare. Urea at 460 g of nitrogen per kilogram, applied at 150 to 300 kg per hectare, delivers tens of kilograms. Nobody should buy this to save money on urea, and we will not build a calculator that pretends otherwise.

Three things could pay for it, and they are priced separately. Yield and quality response, which the trials will measure and which we will publish per crop whichever way it comes out. Fish revenue on the owner path, against operating costs we are metering and have not published. Margin on litres sold, once a retail band is settled. That is also the order of uncertainty, highest first.

The protocol target that the integration guide sets, a 20 to 30 percent cut in the synthetic starter nitrogen rate through better nutrient-use efficiency, is the mechanism that would produce the first of those three. It comes from the guide’s author and not from a completed trial. The trials that will test it are public.

How to think about the decision anyway

An operator can still do useful work with an incomplete model.

Underwrite the purchase against the fish line alone at your own local price, treating every litre of fertilizer as internal transfer at zero external revenue. If the asset does not survive that test on your farm, the fertilizer upside is not a reason to sign; it is a reason to run a trial first and revisit.

Then price the fertilizer line as a separate business with its own working capital, packaging, storage and sales motion. It is not a byproduct that sells itself.

Then ask what a yield response would have to be, on your crop at your price, to justify the programme cost. The calculator computes that breakeven live from your inputs. It has no defaults, because a default here is a way of answering a question the data cannot answer.

Five things would settle it

The metered readings, one week of them, with the meters photographed. The itemized opex build. One governing set of commercial terms as signed documents. One retail band. The first completed paired-plot trial. Each of those replaces a paragraph above with a number, and this page will say which document it came from when it does.

Until then, run your own numbers with your own inputs, or apply and we will walk your land, water and crop against the protocol rather than against a spreadsheet.