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Entrepreneurship
Course: Entrepreneurship > Unit 1
Lesson 8: Giles Shih - President and CEO of BioResource InternationalGiles Shih - President and CEO of BioResource International
Giles Shih, President and CEO of BioResource International, describes his company and explains how producing "big green chickens" will help feed the world. Created by Kauffman Foundation.
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- Does this kind of enzyme supplementation exist for humans? Is it possible to increase the amount of nutrients we absorb from the food we eat and reduce our overall consumption, and could this help maximise the circulation of our current food supply without having to increase it or anything?(29 votes)
- That is an excellent question! We have not yet tested our enzyme supplementation for human nutrition, but we are aware enzyme supplements are available for human consumption to improve health or correct deficiencies in enzyme production. However, human nutrition and food is far more complicated than animal feed, so further study is needed!(25 votes)
- Is His new feed supplement healthy to the chickens? Or is just so that they can be bigger?(4 votes)
- It may be for both, the problem is how most chickens are raised. If chickens were out on pasture, they would not need this stuff.(7 votes)
- Have you guys thought of making feed for fish farmers? There is much commotion on the double standards of fish farming regulations for organic feed due to natural fish health concerns. Maybe you guys can help with your technology?(4 votes)
- Thank you for the idea, but my ideas tend towards natural farming
and production of the product.(3 votes)
- "It's not an antibiotic, it's not a hormone, it's something that's derived from nature". So where are antibiotics and hormones derived from?(5 votes)
- I notice that he does most of his stuff in America, this is extremely good because 90% of our items, aren't made in the U.S.A.(4 votes)
- Aren't chickens generally healthier if they're allowed to be free range and able to scratch the ground for their own food? Seems like I saw a documentary once about a self-sustaining farm where chickens roamed free and fed on worms from the waste of other animals and didn't require grain, etc...(2 votes)
- When you mention the natural supplement for the chickens around, what is the main source that is used for the supplement? Veggies? 0:20(2 votes)
- When iv have a lot of things that iv have to discuss or lots to talk about iv eat healthy Chicken around its good to have a good source of Calcum and proteion and health Vegesss like(1 vote)
- What is the motivation to start this business and what are the challenges you face?(2 votes)
- How is this product useful to we that rear layers birds. And how can I get it in my country NIGERIA(1 vote)
- Does the enzyme supplements pass through the chicken and/or swine and enter the environment through their excitements.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- My name us Giles Shih. I'm president and CEO of
BioResource International. We're a agricultural biotechnology company based in the RTP area, Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. We are basically helping to grow healthier and bigger chickens
in a sustainable way. We have a natural feed supplement that we had developed in
collaboration with NC State, North Carolina State University. And what it does is it helps supplement the animal's natural digestive enzymes to get more nutritional
value out of their feed. We started the company with the idea of commercializing these enzymes for poultry and for pig
animal feed applications. As long as there are people eating more chickens and pigs around the world, we see that a lot in
the developing countries in the emerging countries, we have huge opportunities overseas. We call them our big green chickens. Basically they're healthy
sustainable poultry production, because it's a natural supplement. It's not a antibiotic. It's not a hormone. This is something that's
derived form nature. The product is produced by fermentation. So it's like brewing beer or alcohol, but we're brewing an enzyme. And these are done in very
large scale fermentation tanks. The product comes to us as a spray dried concentrated product. And then we have a mixing facility and packaging facility in North Carolina where we mix and blend and
package the final product. And so the core of our business is really research and development,
production, and delivery. So our customers will be
the Perdues and Tysons of the world, and the Smithfield's. The ones that are growing
poultry, growing swine. And what they do is they add
the product as an additive of about one pound per ton of feed or half a kilo per metric
ton in their feed mills where their mixing corn and
soybean and other rations and then deliver to the farms that way. We sell our product into Brazil, into India, eventually into China. Huge populations that have a need for growing more poultry and swine. And we are a part of that. And that's really exciting for
us and for a lot of people. If you can help them
grow a chicken or a pig at pennies less per pound,
then they're interested. That's what you lead with. But then what we also say is that there's an added benefit here. Because if your chicken or your
pig digests the feed better, they're gonna pollute less. And therefore you're gonna have less issues with environment. We've done studies to show
when you use our enzyme, you can lower the nitrogen
that's excreted as a by-product because the animals
digest the food better. But it's not a easy sell. It takes time. People want to have a healthy poultry that they know have been grown without the use of artificial products, and we think that we can be
part of that long term solution. But these things don't change overnight. In India and China they
have to be more resourceful and find ways to grow
their chickens and pigs economically sustainable and environmentally sustainable ways. Were not just helping
to grow bigger chickens, we're feeding the world. And this is an increasingly
important issue as the population grows.