case study
A local oyster farm
Nómadas got their hands dirty with an aquaculture business that drives climate resilience and low-GHG alternative food by creating a data platform to increase sales, lower overhead, and optimize workflows.
about the client
They say it best: Little Ram Oyster Co. began with a simple belief: that oysters are more than food. They are ecosystem engineers. They clean water. They build habitat. They anchor working waterfront communities. And when grown with care, they tell the story of a place.
But Little Ram is not just about oysters. It is about reclaiming the working waterfront. It is about women building businesses on the bay. It is about connecting people back to where their food comes from. It is about climate resilience, local economies, and proving that small farms can create big impact.
Every oyster we grow filters the water it lives in. Every experience we host brings someone closer to understanding our coastal ecosystem. Every partnership strengthens the future of this shoreline.
overview
Oysters are an excellent choice for your table. From a health perspective as well as environmental one. Unlike many protein alternatives, they contain all nine essential amino acids. They have roughly half the calories of chicken for a similar amount of protein. Not to mention providing zinc, vitamin B12, and iron. With food contributing 1/3rd of human-caused GHG emissions, and oysters generating 0.5% of the emissions per kilogram of protein compared to beef, they are an all-star protein replacement for the sustainably-minded.
Oysters are also ecosystem engineers. They build habitat and clean the water. A single oyster filters ~40 gallons of water per day, filtering chemicals that get into the waters from industrial activity such as herbicides, pesticides, and flame retardants. On top of that, they balance effects of algae blooms to ensure oxygen and sunlight for the whole underwater ecosystem.
The oyster’s status as a sustainability champion makes it the perfect project for Nómadas.
Little Farm Oyster Co. was a budding small business ready to take the leap from back-breaking grinding to efficiency, optimization, and growth. From manual processes and guesswork to automation and data-driven decisions.
To kick start the process, Nómadas focused on the heart of the business - farm stock inventory. With a minimum of 1 year to get to maturation and 4 cold months each year dormant, planning ahead is critical to ensuring ongoing oysters are available to harvest and sell year-round. The data platform logged per individual cage growth stages to predict harvest schedules, predators status (oyster drill snails, sea squirts & barnacles) to plan cleaning, oyster cup depth to schedule tumbling, cage status to plan maintenance, and seed/spat per source to optimize buying costs.
On top of this wealth of data, we built a few modules - a quick-read dashboard to track farm size, farm health, and revenue projections based on existing inventory, workday planners that bubbled up the most urgent and priority takes for the day/week, and utilized an export functionality to perform ad hoc scenario analysis on farm growth and ROI.
approach
DIRTY HANDS
As with all our projects, we started with learning. In the aquaculture industry, the quickest path there was to get our hands dirty. We stepped in and put in hours out on the boat, hours maintaining equipment, hours of inventory logs, and hours of sales conversations. How else would we know to also optimize the user interface experience of our solution for dirty and cold fingers that log data from the boat on touchscreen mobile devices?
SME-
FRIENDLY
You don't need a racecar to drive the kids to school.
Over-engineering a complicated solution wastes time and money, unnecessary software bells & whistles wastes time and money. When time is currency in a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME), fast onboarding and workflow efficiency are key pieces of the financial bottom-line.
We created a custom-targeted, budget-friendly, no-cost tool that used the lingo of the company without the extra overhead.
DATA-DRIVEN EVERY-THING
It doesn't take a lot of data, it just takes the right data.
From planning and predicting to seeding and cleaning, from monitoring and repairing to harvesting and selling, we captured only key data points for each step of the oyster journey.
solutions
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Created open-source data platform solution for inventory management, maintenance workflows, sales projections, and stock growth
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Developed data visualization dashboard with KPIs
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Derived actionable insights to increase sales, optimize seed costs, and harvest timing
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Performed scenario analysis of predictive farm growth
- Generated workflow efficiencies for data logs, oyster care, and cage maintenance
- Designed a data-powered daily & weekly task planner for efficient harvesting and maintenance
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Provided new business advisory services to the co-founders
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Optimized social media strategy to align with latest algorithms and best practices
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Provided data-driven, mobile-optimized web design interaction and SEO strategy
results
$XX,000
Inventory Expenses Saved/ Year*
Increased Sales Opportunity
+15%
Resource Time Saved
* additional visibility intentionally obscured for client confidentiality
“Nailed it. Like talking to a crystal ball filled with our data.”
- Owner, Little Ram Oyster Co.