How do you make commercial fishing a sustainable practice — for our oceans and the fishers who earn their livelihoods at sea?
This is a question a lot of us in this industry are asking right now. And finding a way to create balance, so both can prosper is the big goal the Vericatch team is working towards.
It’s the reason we founded this company and have worked tirelessly to develop a set of tools, we firmly believe, are the best way forward for the commercial fishing industry and our environment.
Because it is possible to prioritize profitability and sustainability simultaneously and our FisheriesApp is proof of that.
Why our FisheriesApp is a win for our industry & our oceans
We are in a difficult moment.
There are people working in commercial fishing that are not operating on best practices and they tarnish our industry as a whole.
Pollution, overfishing, rising water temperatures — these are all threats that need to be addressed. But advocating for the dismantling of the entire industry — as that documentary Seaspiracy did — fails to put any value at all on the lives of the fishers who sustain it.
Regulations are the best option and we can agree they have been necessary, but they pose their own challenges, often making it more complicated, time-consuming, and costly to keep an operation running. Especially when not everyone is abiding by the same rules.
That’s why our FisheriesApp is purposefully built to do two things: save you time and allow you to collect the kind of hard data that gives you the ability to prove compliance and further optimize your operation. So you aren’t forced into the false choice between profitability or sustainability.
You deserve to be able to reclaim time on paperwork so your margins make sense again and you deserve to be recognized and rewarded for leading with integrity. Our industry would be a lot more prosperous if the people who safeguard our oceans are the ones regulators come to entrust with their stewardship.
The real-world commercial fishing challenges that inspired us
If you looked at our About page you’d find out that our team is made up of veteran fishermen, ocean science experts, and technical specialists who each bring a distinct perspective and set of experiences to the table.
We want to be able to offer you practical solutions to the challenges you face on a day-to-day basis, so we’re continually developing our FisheriesApp and working to make it an inherently flexible tool. One that fits a multitude of needs, while still being functional and highly effective.
For example, we know it’s not uncommon for fishers to hold multiple fishing licenses that each have their own specific reporting requirements. So FisheriesApp has been intentionally designed to be highly configurable, giving you the ability to fulfill any reporting obligation seamlessly from one place — no matter what you fish for.
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We understand too that when you’re out on the water, you don’t always have a cell or wifi connection, so we’ve pushed to make FisheriesApp available when you’re offline. Any data you collect or catch reporting you do offline will automatically be uploaded when you get back to a service area, so you can wrap up your day knowing you’re adhering to regulations without a mountain of paperwork plaguing you.
And that’s not the only time savings it offers.
Giving you the ability to eliminate the inefficient, costly, error-prone paper-based systems our industry has relied on for generations — so you can digitize your data and start getting real-time insights about your operation — is something we’ve come to understand is essential to finding that sustainable equilibrium we’re striving for.
It gives fishers like you the ability to reclaim their day for more important things and it empowers everyone involved to make more informed decisions, based on real data and not just best guesses.
You can track things like fuel usage and trip routes, so you can better plan for each season, but you can also pull past catch reports and other metrics to demonstrate compliance or develop a more comprehensive picture of what’s happening year over year in a specific region.
The kind of data you can collect with FisheriesApp is the kind of data that only regulatory bodies have traditionally had access to. And we believe that democratizing it and putting the power to collect and visualize data in everyone’s hands is the best way to find sustainable solutions to the problems we face right now.
With the FisheriesApp you can gain more meaningful insights into what’s happening in different regions, you can maintain compliance, and you can do all that without sacrificing your livelihood.
Get in touch with us if you’d like to learn more about how FisheriesApp can be adapted to your specific catch reporting and operational needs.
