Five & 20 VIP Getaway Giveaway 

Donate $50 or more and you could be entered to win a VIP Five & 20 Spirits & Brewing Getaway Package for two! One lucky winner will receive a $100 travelcard and a Five & 20 swag bag including a six-pack of glasses, t-shirts, and other merchandise. Plus a free tasting of Five & 20 beers and spirits; and two free snacks from Bird our seasonal eatery that's open select days/hours. This VIP experience is available to use between Sept. 13 - 30, 2018, and April 1, 2019 - September 30, 2019. We will email all who donate $50 or more to offer a chance to win this giveaway.

Contest Rules: 

Must be 21 or older to enter. This package has no cash or trade-in value. One lucky winner will win a $100 AMEX (or other) Travelcard plus a Five & 20 swag bag. Winner will be chosen at random, contacted by email and given 72 hours to respond or we may choose another winner. We will mail out the getaway package to the winner. Entrants' information will only be shared with Timber Fish and Five & 20 Spirits & Brewing. The promotion ends on September 5th at 11:59 pm EST. 

What Is TimberFish - Let’s Get Into the Details

TimberFish takes low value plant material combines it with nutrients from food processing facilities to grow feed for seafood

Our only outputs are clean water and a biological residuals that are an enhanced biofuel

Assuring the food supply is one of the most critical issues facing humanity.  Seafood is capable of being a major part of the solution, but declining supply, rising costs, health concerns and pollution issues are limiting consumption.  Wild caught seafood supply has been declining for thirty years. Seafood farms in oceans and rivers are striving to meet supply shortfalls, but they:

• Are generally located far from major markets, create local pollution, are vulnerable to disease and natural hazards, while their costs are increasing
• Require marine feeds that introduce additional contaminants into the farmed seafood

A potential solution is to develop recirculating land-based systems to meet future supply shortfalls, but current technologies are not able to overcome these critical shortcomings. As they:

• Require the use of feeds from agricultural crops and marine proteins that introduce contaminants (e.g. mercury. Lead, PCBs and insecticides), which are increasingly seen as serious health problems
• Produce seafood with inferior taste, texture, color and nutritional value
• Require costly waste treatment to clean waste water which is high in nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as contaminants introduced in the feed
• Are not economical - there have been several costly failures in the US

• Eliminates the quality and health issues described above
• Reuses nutrients in “wastewater” from food processors, such as breweries, distilleries and wineries to grow seafood, while cleaning wastewater, reducing the food processors’ cost and protecting the environment
• Combining these nutrients with non-human food based inputs such as wood chips in the system as the only other input
• Reducing greenhouse gases by bringing production closer to markets; reducing fuel usage, promoting carbon sequestering, encouraging reforestation and creating a byproduct biofuel

TimberFish‘s advantages include: 

• Internally growing contaminant-free, natural, healthy feed that produces healthy seafood
• Using our spent wood chips to generate heat or electricity partially offsetting energy costs
• Producing clean output water without added equipment or operating cost
• Reducing the length of the supply chain – On average US seafood is shipped an average of 5,500 miles to markets
• Requiring minimal water intake
• Lowering construction costs

The $150 billion global seafood industry faces serious supply uncertainties and is growing at 2.0 to 2.5%/year. Seafood growth should be significantly higher as it is the most efficient way of producing animal protein.  In recent years, costs have steadily increased and the lack of affordable, seafood is impacting demand. In addition, concern over quality and safety issues have further limited growth. TimberFish’s technology addresses key issues limiting demand.

TimberFish’s initial customers will be US retailers for sale at their fresh seafood counters. Sales will be aimed at health, quality and environmentally concerned buyers. Our total potential sales in this market to be about $850 million/year.

  Our initial target market -fresh seafood counters

Longer-term, as supply shortfalls increase and public awareness demands more healthy seafood options, we believe quality and cost advantages will allow us to target the $15 billion more cost competitive frozen and canned segments. We are confident TimberFish will be competitive in this larger market.  Additionally, global sales are an even greater opportunity being about fifteen times the size of the total US market.

Short Science Section – How It Works…

TimberFish mimics nature, creating an ecosystem that simultaneously grows feed and consumes solid and dissolved wastes. The process controls pathogens and organisms that give seafood unwanted taste. Our facilities will be built beside food processing facilities, breweries and wineries. We will use their nutrient-rich wastewater, combined with local wood chips to grow microbes, which are consumed by invertebrates and in turn consumed by our happy, healthy, marketable fish!  

The process is controlled to prevent contaminants from entering the system/seafood. Water is recirculated to minimize usage.  The only residuals from the system are spent wood which will be sold as biofuel and clean water.

At least three businesses, each supporting job growth and the local economy are directly supported by our venture.  Wood harvesting and chipping, TimberFish itself and local truckers, as well as reducing costs for our nutrient source.

TimberFish is a continuous biological-based process that grows microbes, invertebrates and seafood while cleaning waste water and producing valuable byproducts and emits only clean water to the environment

Performance Details

Our technology has been demonstrated with rainbow trout:

• In field trials at our facility in Westfield, New York, run between 2008 to 2014 (below left)
• The technology was validated at the Freshwater Institute, located in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, is one of the world’s most eminent marine research organizations (below right)

Testing at Freshwater verified fish growth, properties and taste, as well as wastewater quality. Their final report noted several key advantages of TimberFish’s process versus other land-based processes:

• Raised rainbow trout from fingerling to pan size in 24 weeks with only 1% mortality

• Produced a less fatty fish with slightly more protein when compared to other farm raised rainbow trout
• Fish had higher concentrations of polyunsaturated fats
• Fish had a 30% higher Omega-3 fatty acid level

Freshwater reported “For these reasons, the TimberFish system appears to have considerable potential for rainbow trout production with little water or wastewater footprint and with reduced feed input.”

 Typical rainbow trout grown in TimberFish's field trial

Our Business Plan - Where We Are Going

With funds raised on Indiegogo, TimberFish will expand our development facility using it to create the design for commercial facilities, document the superiority of our seafood and develop a marketing plan. We anticipate having our first commercial facility operating in 2021. We are currently meeting with potential partners to work with us on this facility, starting with engineering design firms and potential retail partners. 

How this Indiegogo Campaign will be used

Our next step at TimberFish Technologies is to engage an engineering firm to produce designs/blueprints for replicable commercial facilities.  Secondly, we need to fully document the superiority of our seafood by sending it for independent laboratory analysis.  Engineering, design and lab testing are necessary, but costly activities.

Our business proposition is that TimberFish Technologies is an environmentally sound solution to economically produce seafood. We believe we have significant advantages versus competitors based:

• Creating an ecosystem that simultaneously grows feed and consumes solid and dissolved wastes, while controlling pathogens and organisms that give seafood unwanted tastes
• On using low cost inputs to grow our own feed while cleaning waste without additional costs. 
• Having three revenue streams from: producing natural, healthy seafood, cleaning wastewater from food processing facilities, such as wineries and breweries, and our only waste is a valuable biofuel

Our approach to rapidly growing the business is to license the technology globally to local companies, preferably already in the seafood supply chain. This strategy allows local companies to use their operating expertise, financial strength and market knowledge to rapidly grow production providing healthy, environmentally sound seafood to the public. By having multiple licensees in different regions we can simultaneously grow in several areas making our vision a reality sooner.

We have compared the costs of producing seafood with our technology to published information about the operation and cost structure of seafood farms. Our research revealed that our costs will be at least 30% below competitors.  Analysis of our operating and construction costs indicate that commercial facilities using TimberFish’s process would be excellent investments. 

Risks & Challenges

TimberFish has successfully grown salable fish from fingerlings during several years of field and validated these results in third party testing. The latter quantified health benefits as well as water quality. We are highly confident that we can reproduce these results at a larger scale in our demonstration facility and in subsequent commercial facilities.

We need to learn how to optimize the various interactions within larger systems and assure that the process runs efficiently and economically.  These are the tasks that we will use the funds we raise on Indiegogo to resolve using our demonstration facility.  Since our process is based on wastewater treatment we can rely on an existing large knowledge base and our own prior work experience to manage what is happening within the system.  Part of our team invented and lead the launch of Bion, a livestock waste management system company in the 1990s.  Bion is currently operating and listed on the OTC stock exchanges.  Other team members have extensive experiences in launching new business and new products globally.

In addition the farming of seafood is a large industry, and managing these facilities is well known and this knowledge can be applied to our system

We know that TimberFish’s technology works and we know how engineering designs for commercial facilities are generated.  The challenge is doing it economically, which will be the difference between this being a niche technology and being a disruptive change in how seafood is grown.

THE REAL RISK IS NOT GIVING TIMBERFISH A CHANCE TO HELP SECURE THE FOOD SUPPLY AND PRO-ACTIVELY IMPROVE THE ENVIRONMENT