Robins McIntosh is suffering from the after-effects of his first bout of COVID-19 when IntraFish catches up with him on a video call from his Bangkok office, and the fatigue is getting to him.
He is not a man who likes to sit around. Though now "somewhere around 65," the American splits his time between Thailand and the United States, where he spends around three months out of the year overseeing the construction of CP Foods' huge indoor recirculating aquaculture system shrimp farm, Homegrown Shrimp.
Raised in the liberal, activist community of Gainesville, Florida, during the 1960s, McIntosh says the city is "responsible for who he became."
Playing in the street as a child with the likes of musician Tom Petty, the environment engendered creativity and individuality. A later stint at boarding school that he "hated" also taught him resilience.
And combined, the mindset has been a hallmark of McIntosh's work ever since: to think outside the box, to innovate, to do the impossible and to persevere despite mistakes.
A back pocket map
McIntosh hadn't really planned to be a shrimp farmer.
Studying biology at university and marine botany at graduate school interjected by a "lost year" painting University of Florida dormitories, McIntosh had it in mind to become an environmental lawyer, a role that seemed important to him years before it did to many others -- something he once again attributes to his Gainesville upbringing.
While it didn't seem realistic to him at the time, in his back pocket, McIntosh also carried a dream of starting a shrimp farm, thanks to his father, who had shown him a newspaper clipping of what was probably the United States' first venture into the industry.
"He showed me a picture of this farm in the panhandle of Florida and said 'this is what we need. We need farming because then I can eat my favorite food every day of the year,'" McIntosh said.
"He was a farmer from the south, so it was pioneering to him. So I took that and I went to the University of Florida bookstore and I got a chart of the Florida panhandle. And I circled the bay. And I go, 'This is my future shrimp farm, this bay here.' And I carried that map around with me through graduate school."
An internship at a local macrobrachium farm to study its algae is what eventually directed him into shrimp farming, but his career at CP Foods, one of Asia's largest integrated food companies, was longer in the works.
Saying 'no' to CP Foods
McIntosh's career has taken him all over the world.
He worked on Myanmar shrimp farms until the 1988 revolution "relocated" him, placing him in Thailand working for a company developing "the largest, most modern technological shrimp hatchery at that time," according to McIntosh.
While managing the hatchery, McIntosh refused entry to a CP Foods executive who had travelled from Bangkok to see it on the basis of his strict biosecurity rules.
Despite the embarrassed protestations of his colleagues, McIntosh didn't relent. He did however agree to tell him about their set-up from the observation window.
"I explained everything we did because it wasn't about secrecy. It was about biosecurity, which was really not a word back then," said McIntosh. "But, you know, for me, I was trying to implement something that I didn't even understand."
The executive turned out to be Chingchai Lohawatanakul, or "Dr. Lin" as he is more commonly known. Lohawatanakul was CEO of CP’s feed operations in Taiwan, who had recently returned to Thailand to kick off the company's shrimp farming project.
After an hour of McIntosh explaining his thoughts, Lin left and McIntosh didn't hear from him again for 12 years, when he received a handwritten letter on his desk in the middle of the Belize jungle.
No one was making any money. They didn't have screens in their windows. Their trucks were broken down. They were on the way out. This was a sinking boat and it was sinking fast
The note explained the decade-long absence of contact (McIntosh paraphrases): "My team and I discussed what you showed us at the hatchery in Thailand and our conclusion was that you were some kind of nutcase."
But at this point in Thailand, the shrimp farming industry was in dire straights, and Lin had finally begun to understand what McIntosh had been trying to implement all those years back.
"You need to come home," he wrote.
What followed, at a dinner a couple of months later in Thailand, was what McIntosh describes as "the most brilliant recruitment line he could have fed me."
"Because he clearly could read people very well, he realized my greatest ambition is not money. It is success and moving industries," McIntosh said.
The line? "Robins, you've created a masterpiece in Belize. But it's a small masterpiece. I'm going to give you the canvas of all of Asia. You're going to create the largest masterpiece the world has ever seen."
An integral role in Asia's transition to vannamei
McIntosh is too modest to say he created a masterpiece, but he did play an integral role in resurrecting a sinking ship and establishing the modern-day vannamei farming industry across Asia.
Up until he stepped in, the Asian industry was farming monodon shrimp, and it was failing.
"When I left Thailand in 1992, the average monodon going into a processing plant was 30 grams. When I came back in 2001, it was 17 grams," he said.
"No one was making any money. They didn't have screens in their windows. Their trucks were broken down. They were on the way out. This was a sinking boat and it was sinking fast."
McIntosh had seen this same sinking ship before in Central America in 1993. So he decided to do what he had done there. To throw out the practice of farming from wild stock and introduce specific pathogen free (SPF) shrimp to the Asian industry.
"I knew it was the broodstock. I knew it was that pathogen loads had built up in these animals. And there was no correcting this without correcting the stocks."
SPF monodon, however, was not available and would have taken five or six years to produce. So SPF vannamei was brought onto farms and the improvement was fast and absolute.
It wasn't the first time SPF vannamei had been introduced in Asia. Taiwan and China had tried before, but there was a failure to understand what it was about SPF shrimp that made them successful, hence improvements to date had been short-lived.
"Probably my biggest contribution was educating farmers that SPF does not have anything to do with genetics," McIntosh said. "It has to do with health. You can only maintain health by keeping them in nucleus breeding facilities."
Forever learning, forever challenging
McIntosh repeats a pattern of fighting the naysayers throughout his career and it is part of why he agreed to set up Homegrown Shrimp two years ago: because no one had done it before.
"When people have told me I can't do things, it's kind of motivational," he says.
"Everything we did in Belize, you can't do," he said. "But in the end it changed paradigms."
It is this creativity that has made him successful.
"It's not being boxed in and saying, 'You can't do it,'" McIntosh said. "You know, it's almost now I realize that if you can't do it, that says I must do it."
He also has a strong belief in being brave enough to learn on the job and to get things wrong. Homegrown Shrimp is a case in point. McIntosh emphasized there will be many iterations of the model before they get it right.
"It's about learning, always learning ... if you don't learn you're not doing your job," he said.
"There should always be innovation. You should always be looking at what is limiting and what can be made better. And be honest with yourself. If you totally screw up -- and I have -- you tell yourself you screwed up and you go in another direction. There's no reason to follow a broken path."
Road bikes and internationalism
Bred from Southerners, his mother a Floridian, his father from Alabama, McIntosh says his liberal Gainesville upbringing "tempered some of the ugliness of the South" in him, but the etiquette of the South, the ethics of the South, the hospitality of the South, the family of the South, are in his bones.
And while he is most definitely a people person, he has no interest in managing staff, choosing to surround himself with a tight team of trusted colleagues who he in turn trusts to manage his broader CPF team.
His family now is made up of his Burmese wife and their grown son, who McIntosh describes as very internationalist. Born in Guatemala, educated in Europe, he is at home almost everywhere and speaks both Spanish and some Burmese and Thai.
McIntosh is most at home on a bicycle and takes a long ride every time he has a problem to solve or something that needs thinking about, he said.
"I mean, when you lack oxygen, all of a sudden your brain can think of things that normally would be locked out of thinking," McIntosh said. "You get into a zone. The most creative moments I've had are in these moments."
The prolonged impacts of pandemic
The pandemic stifled the creativity McIntosh is so passionate about.
"The isolation was horrible," he says.
And while he found video calling to initially be a new and interesting learning experience, he quickly tired of it, missing the lack of face-to-face contact that had been an integral part of his success to date.
"It does not take the place of going to meetings. It does not take the place of going to farms. It does not take the place of interacting with real people," he said, adding that most of his ideas and background information come from meeting with farmers and hatchery owners informally.
"Where you're having tea or having a meal, you're letting people put their guards down and then they tell you what they really think. You don't get that with Zoom.
"I feel more out of touch with the industry today than I've ever felt in my life," he said.
McIntosh is now trying to get back to the way he used to work, meeting people and visiting farms, but he feels like the culture of the industry, and perhaps the world, has changed with people not seeing the same necessity for face-to-face contact any more.
But for him, work on the ground is an absolute necessity.
"You ask me when I'm happiest, it's walking around the pond. I get an energy from that."
