An Oral History of Shrimp Farming in the
Western Hemisphere
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As Told By
Bill More:
Bill is a shrimp farming consultant and vice
president of the Aquaculture Certification
Council. He got started in shrimp farming in
1962 and spent twenty years in Panama developing
one of the most successful shrimp farms in the
Western Hemisphere.
Jim
Heerin:
Jim is co-chairman of Sea Farms International,
Inc., the management company for one of the
largest (16,000 acres of ponds in Honduras)
shrimp farming operations in the Western
Hemisphere. He got started in shrimp farming in
1966.
David
Drennan:
David is manager of a shrimp hatchery in the
Dominican Republic. Previously, as a
consultant, he worked for many of the most
successful shrimp farming operations in Central
America. He owns many “firsts” in shrimp
farming. For example, he was the first person
to spawn Penaeus vannamei! He got
started in shrimp farming in 1967.
Russ
Allen:
Russ is a shrimp farming consultant, president
of the United States Shrimp Farmers Association,
and president of Seafood Systems, which designs
and builds aquaculture facilities. He started
farming shrimp in 1976 in Ecuador. He says in
the early days in Ecuador, “War-like conditions
existed between Empacadora Nacional and
Empacadora Shayne—Hatfield and McCoy stuff—in
boats, at night, just a few degrees south of the
equator.”
Henry Clifford:
Henry is technical director at Shrimp
Improvement Systems, a supplier of genetically
improved broodstock and seedstock. He got
started in shrimp farming in 1979. Later his
consulting company, a partnership with Harvey
Persyn, industrialized shrimp farming in Brazil
and promoted the idea of domesticating shrimp
broodstock in recirculating systems. His
company introduced P. vannamei to
Brazil.
Larry
Drazba:
Larry is manager of Camanica, S.A., a
700-hectare, semi-intensive shrimp farm and
processing plant in Nicaragua. He got started
in 1980, farming freshwater prawns (Macrobrachium
rosenbergii) in Mexico, and over the last 25
years has experienced many of the harsh ups and
downs associated with shrimp farming.
Background
Shrimp farming traces its origins
to Southeast Asia where for centuries farmers
raised incidental crops of wild shrimp in tidal
fishponds.
Modern shrimp farming was born in
the 1930s when Motosaku Fujinaga, a graduate of
Tokyo University, succeeded in spawning the
kuruma shrimp (Penaeus japonicus).
He cultured larvae through to market size in the
laboratory and succeeded in mass producing them
on a commercial scale. For more than 40 years,
he generously shared his findings and published
papers on his work in 1935, 1941, 1942 and
1967. Emperor Hirohito honored him with the
title “Father of Inland Japonicus Farming”.
In 1954, after having achieved
the title of Director of the Research Bureau of
the Japanese Fisheries Agency, Fujinaga retired
and, in 1963, he and some colleagues started a
shrimp farm. They used large, semi-intensive
ponds on discarded salt beds and sandy beaches,
instead of following Fujinaga’s original idea of
super-intensive ponds. In its May 1965 issue,
National Geographic
magazine reported: “Despite years of hard work,
capped with brilliant technical success, Dr.
Fujinaga has yet to make a profit from his
operation. But he...expects to turn the corner
within two or three years.” That was the
experience of most shrimp farmers in the 1960s,
and many sing the same song today.
Fujinaga also deserves the title
“Father of Modern Shrimp Farming”. In 1996, his
sons, Ted and Kochi, worked as shrimp farming
consultants in Southeast Asia.
In the early 1960s, a small
shrimp farming industry sprang up around Japan’s
Inland Sea and on the southern side of Kyushu
Island, near the cities of Amakusa and
Kagoshima. In 1964, J. Kittaka developed a
technique for rearing shrimp larvae in large
outdoor tanks that simulated the natural
enviornment. In 1973, Mitsui Norin Marine
Company, Ltd., pioneered the use of
double-bottomed tanks, after a design by Kuni
Shigueno.
World Shrimp Farming 1992
pegged Japan’s production of
farmed shrimp at 3,000 metric tons (live
weight), from 150 semi-intensive and intensive
farms with 400 hectares of ponds. In the
Kagoshima area of Kyushu, farmers used large,
round, land-based tanks and produced 15,000 to
20,000 kilograms per hectare. Later,
semi-intensive farms appeared on Japan’s
southern islands—Okinawa, for example.
A cool climate, a rugged coast
and high costs mitigate against shrimp farming
in Japan. But, since Japanese consumers pay
amazingly high prices for fresh “live” kuruma
shrimp (P. japonicus),
Japanese shrimp farmers will find a way to
service that market. Recently, farmers in
northern Australia began growing kuruma shrimp
for the live market in Japan.
Although Japan never became a
major shrimp farming nation, events were taking
place in the United States that would thrust it
to the forefront of shrimp farming technology.
In 1950, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of
Commercial Fisheries (later to be named the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service) established a lab in
Galveston, Texas, to investigate the red tides
that were killing large populations of
commercially valuable marine life. These
investigations led to the development of
techniques for culturing marine phytoplankton.
In 1958, when the lab began investigating larval
shrimp rearing, it used marine phytoplankton to
feed the larval stages of shrimp—and the famed
“Galveston Hatchery Technology” was born.
As the pieces of shrimp farming
technology dribbled out, consultants, large
corporations, feed companies and investors
carried them to Latin America, particularly
Honduras, Panama, Brazil and Ecuador, where they
teamed up with local entrepreneurs to build
farms, hatcheries, feed mills and processing
plants. Worldwide, researchers and farmers
tested dozens of penaeid species for their
farming potential. In the process, they worked
out breeding and spawning techniques for most of
the farmed species. Other research concentrated
on growout technology, nutrition and disease.
These early efforts laid the groundwork for an
industry that expanded for two decades.
At the Fourth Latin American
Aquaculture Congress and Exhibition (Panama,
October 2000), I interviewed Bill More, at the
time vice president of operations at Agromarina
de Panama, one of the oldest and most successful
shrimp farms in the Western Hemisphere. Bill
got started in shrimp farming in 1962. He is
currently vice president of the Aquaculture
Certification Council and a shrimp farming
consultant.
A continuous
flotilla of islands along the Texas coast
creates a 500-mile-long
inter-coastal
waterway that’s interlaced with warm bays and
fertile lagoons—the perfect nursery ground for
juvenile shrimp. The breaks between the islands
are called “passes”, and it’s through these
passes that shrimp larvae, born in the open
ocean, enter the nursery ground.
Shrimp News:
How did you get started in shrimp farming?
Bill More:
When I graduated from college in
1962, the State of Texas hired me as a marine
biologist. One of my first responsibilities was
to identify the shrimp larvae entering Texas
bays through the island passes. The state
needed the data to update shrimp fishing
regulations. Not really knowing where to start,
I went to Harry Cook (currently a shrimp farming
consultant) at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service’s Bureau of Commercial Fisheries in
Galveston, Texas. At the time, the Fish and
Wildlife Service was part of the Department of
Interior. Later it moved to the Department of
Commerce and was renamed the National Marine
Fisheries Service.
One of my jobs, working in
conjunction with biologists from the Fish and
Wildlife Service, was to collect shrimp larvae
entering the passes and try to identify them by
species. Since the species were difficult to
identify accurately, the decision was made to
grow the larvae and describe the various
stages. Females of three penaeid species were
spawned in the Galveston Lab, using a technique
described by Fielder in the 1950s. Ray Wheeler,
a biologist at the Fish and Wildlife Service,
raised some of them in a little lagoon next to
the Galveston Lab. By observing the larvae as
they passed through various life stages, the
shrimp species were identified. This was all
taking place from 1963 to 1965.
At the time, our interest was
primarily in pink shrimp (Penaeus duorarum),
brown shrimp (P. aztecus),
and white shrimp (P. setiferus),
the major species caught by commercial fishermen
in Texas. We had trouble finding female white
shrimp that had mated. We found females with
eggs and females that had spawned, but we could
not find females with the male spermatophore
attached. Since the Fish and Wildlife Service
only contracted boats to fish between 8:00 a.m.
and 6:00 p.m., we were probably heading back to
port about the time the P.
setiferus
were mating. By the time we started fishing the
next morning, the females had spawned and the
spermatophores were gone.
In 1964 or 1965, we shipped some
larvae to Jerry Broom who was working for the
Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries
on Grand Terre Island, at a pilot mariculture
station for oysters and shrimp. Other than work
done in South Carolina in the late 1950s and
early 1960s by Bob Lunz, Jerry was the first
person to grow commercial quantities of shrimp
in the Western Hemisphere (1966-67)!
At the time, there were no
commercial shrimp feeds, so Jerry used catfish
feed. It was not very efficient, but it was a
start. Later on, when I began growing shrimp in
Palacios, Texas (1968-69), we used a dry,
extruded cat (not catfish) food that worked much
better, but it floated. We mashed it to make it
sink and got better results. The shrimp grew
faster.
In 1968, Jerry Broom, David
Drennan, and Eric Heald, under contract with
United Fruit Company/Armour Company developed a
shrimp farm on the Atlantic coast of Honduras,
near Tulian. Initially, they worked with brown
shrimp spawned at a marine laboratory set up by
Dr. Claire Idyll at the University of Miami
around 1967 or 1968.
Brown shrimp did not do well in
ponds in Honduras. In 1968 or 1969, David
Drennan went to Panama to look for new species.
He brought back some P.
occidentalis,
a white shrimp
that makes up 80% of the commercial catch on the
Pacific Coast of Panama. Occidentalis
is easy to spawn and, in the ocean, it grows
very fast to a large size. In ponds, it proved
it was not a good candidate for shrimp farming
because of slow growth and low survival. Over
the last 20 years, occidentalis
has been looked
at
several times, but it is always the same story:
low survivals and poor growth when stocked at
commercial densities (more than eight postlarvae
per square meter). If crowded, they stop
growing.
Jerry Broom had some success
growing occidentalis
in Honduras—at low densities (less than five
postlarvae per square meter). Nonetheless, in
1969, United Fruit and Armour pulled the plug on
the project.
Meanwhile back in Texas, in 1967,
the State of Texas decided to build a Marine
Fisheries Station in Palacios, Texas. Some
ponds were devoted to redfish and oyster culture
and others to shrimp culture research. Ponds
stocked with brown and pink shrimp grew very
slowly but white shrimp (setiferus),
collected
from the bay and grown in ponds
produced biomass four
times larger than anything produced from the
pinks and
browns, and they grew
twice as fast. In 1968, we produced 800
pounds per acre of 12 to 14-gram animals in 120
days.
In 1969, Ralston Purina, already
a producer of trout and catfish feeds, visited
the Palacios facility because of its interest in
marine fish feeds—and noticed the work we were
doing with redfish and shrimp. Shortly after
the visit, Purina hired me to head up a research
and development team to explore the potential of
farming shrimp commercially in the United
States.
In 1970, Dennis Zensen and I (for
Purina) negotiated a contract with Florida Power
Corporation in Crystal River,
Florida. A research facility, built in 1970,
commenced with the idea of producing pink and
brown shrimp for the bait market and then
switching to white shrimp for human consumption.
In March 1971, Purina hired David
Drennan and sent him to Panama to look for other
species of shrimp because the only commercial
candidate we had at that time was the Gulf white
shrimp, P.
setiferus.
Yoshi Hirono, hired in 1970 to run the hatchery,
had been working for Dr. W. Tack Yang
at the University of Miami, where he
lived and worked in a little laboratory on a
very low budget. Bill MacGrath, a nutritionist
at Ralston Purina, came on board in July 1971 to
develop shrimp feeds. Later the same year,
Padge Beasley was hired as
growout
manager; and Ron Staha, as hatchery manager.
Already on board was Melvin McKey, as
construction supervisor. In 1971, 15 raceway
ponds were constructed (some of them a
quarter-acre, others a half-acre) and stocked
with native species of brown, pink and white
shrimp, and imported white shrimp from Panama.
Following completion of the facility, Harvey
Persyn (currently a shrimp farming consultant),
Durwood Dugger (also a shrimp farming
consultant) and Ron Wulff (last report, raising
snakes in Arizona) were hired. Ron had one of
the greenest thumbs I had ever seen and was a
natural at aquaculture. In 1972, William (Bill)
MacGrath became Director of Research and
Development in St. Louis, and I was
Manager/Director of the research station in
Crystal River. Bill left the company in about
1977 and had a long and successful career in
shrimp farming in Ecuador and Honduras.
In 1972, David Drennan shipped a
couple of P.
vannamei
spawns to
Crystal River. The eggs
hatched and
two tanks were
stocked with nauplii. We produced about
110,000 postlarvae
and stocked them in quarter-acre ponds. Ninety
days later, to our amazement, the equivalent of
4,000 pounds per acre of 14-17 gram shrimp were
produced, without aeration! We really got
excited, called in all the Ralston Purina
honchos from St. Louis, and shared our results.
Since the Crystal River pilot facility was the
pet project of Purina’s
Chairman Hal
Dean, we really got a lot of
attention. After taking a careful look at our
results, Purina was ready to go with a
commercial shrimp farm.
Since vannamei
is a non-indigenous
species, the State said there was no chance that
it could be grown in Florida, so Purina turned
to Latin America where it had feed mills and
tuna processing plants. Mexico was eliminated
because shrimp farming, at the time,
was reserved for
cooperatives sponsored by the government.
We ended up in Brazil in 1972, where an
agreement was negotiated with the University of
Pernambuco in Recife to renovate some old ponds
that had been used
for snook culture. The ponds were on a
penal colony island, just north of Recife.
Using prison labor, twenty 1/10-acre ponds were
constructed (dug by hand). David Drennan
sourced P. schmitti
and
P. brasiliensis
from Venezuela
and sent them to Crystal River, where postlarvae
were produced and shipped to Brazil. We worked
with eight different species of peneaids:
occidentalis, stylirostris, vannamei,
brasiliensis, schmitti, aztecus, duorarum,
and
japonicus.
The Brazilian team that went with me consisted
of Yosuke Hirono, Padge Beasley and Melvin McKey.
In 1971, when I went into Brazil
with Ralston Purina to farm shrimp, there were
no shrimp farms in Central America. Ecuador and
Brazil had a few extensive shrimp ponds, but no
big semi-intensive farms.
In 1972, the Marifarms Group,
working with Japanese technology and under the
management of John Cheshire, started a shrimp
farm in Panama City, Florida. It built a
hatchery, fenced off an entire bay and began
farming Penaeus setiferus,
an indigenous
white shrimp. Marifarms had a Japanese
biologist named Y. Akamena, who
trained Chris Howell, who has had a long career
in shrimp farming and currently runs a hatchery
in Malaysia. Marifarms was actually ranching
shrimp. It stocked postlarvae in its huge bay
and attempted to harvest them several months
later.
The Japanese had always worked
with P. japonicus;
they had never
worked with white shrimp
and,
consequently, did not have much luck with them.
They didn’t understand setiferus’s
breeding cycle. They didn’t know
that they needed wild females with
spermatophores attached. Harvey Persyn,
currently a shrimp farming consultant, and David
Drennan, currently a hatchery manager in the
Dominica Republic, went up to Panama City to
help Marifarms. They took them out on a boat
and showed them how to catch gravid females in
Apalachicola Bay. We helped them off and on
during their run at shrimp farming, but then the
environmentalists got after them and they
abandoned the project because of substained
losses. Shrimp fishermen also protested the
fencing off of a bay that had previously been
open for fishing.
Another significant event
occurred in 1973, before we went into Panama
with Agromarina de Panama. Jim Heerin
(currently chairman and chief executive officer
of Shrimp Culture, Inc., the management company
for one of the largest shrimp farms in the
world) and Don Sweat were running a turtle
processing operation in Florida called Sea
Farms. When turtle fishing was banned, they
decided to get into shrimp farming. They set up
a bunch of hatchery tanks in Key West and ran
trials with aztecus
and duorarum.
These species turned out to be poor candidates
for farming. So we formed a little joint
venture with Sea Farms in 1972. We sourced
gravid females in Panama and shipped half off to
our facility in Crystal River and half to their
hatchery in Key West. Later, Sea Farms
developed successful shrimp farms in Honduras.
In 1975 or 1976, Dr. Harold
Webber, a consultant, convinced a bunch of
American investors to build a big shrimp farm in
Costa Rica. Called Maricultura, it still
operates today under a different name and
ownership. Harold’s team of shrimp people
included Billy Drummond, Eric Heald and Jerry
Broom.
By the mid-1970s, there were
three big semi-intensive shrimp farms in Central
America: Sea Farms, Maricultura and our
operation, Agromarina de Panama. Ecuador also
got rolling about the same time, followed by
Peru, but there were no shrimp farms in
Venezuela or Colombia. Brazil was still fooling
around with japonicus.
When Harvey Persyn left Agromarina de Panama in
1981, he went to Brazil and built the first
vannamei/stylirostris
farm there.
When I arrived in Brazil in 1972,
there was already a project in northeast Brazil,
owned by a Dutch company, that produced salt,
Artemia
(brine shrimp)—and shrimp! They were stocking
japonicus
in large ponds and once a month, during the
highest tide, they would open the gates and
capture the shrimp as they migrated out of the
pond. The managers would take what they wanted
for their own use and sell the rest locally,
probably no more than a few hundred pounds a
year under the best of conditions. The amazing
thing is that the japonicus
were reproducing in the ponds.
While in Brazil, we evaluated
eight species, once during the rainy season and
once during the dry season. Vannamei
did three times
better than any other species. It grew faster
and had higher survivals. After two years of
research and development in Brazil, Purina
decided to commercialize the business and
requested a permit from the Brazilian government
to import a non-indigenous species from the
United States (Crystal River).
The government denied the
permit. Nicaragua was considered, but a
contract could not be negotiated. In 1974, we
found a home in Panama and negotiated a
4,000-hectare land concession and a twenty-year
tax holiday.
In 1974, I moved to Panama as
general manager and with a team of experts
consisting of Yosuke Hirono, Padge Beasley, Ron
Staha, Melvin McKey, David Drennan started
Agromarina de Panama. Yosuke was in charge of
research and development. He spent part of his
time in the hatchery and part on the farm.
Padge was in charge of the farm, and Ron was in
charge of the hatchery in Veracruz. David
Drennan managed our sourcing operations and
Melvin McKey was the project engineer. Harvey
Persyn was manager of Crystal River operations
and William MacGrath was director of research
and development in St. Louis.
David would go out every night,
capture mated females, spawn them on the boat,
hatch the eggs and bring the nauplii back to the
hatchery. From 1974 to 1976, roughly eighty
percent of Agromarina”s production was P.
stylirostris
because it was easier to source mated females of
this species. Although Agromarina grew 800 to
1,200 pounds per acre of 18-20 gram animals,
production of P. vannamei
was better (2,000 pounds per acre).
When
it became
apparent that we could not sustain a year-round
commercial operation using P.
stylirostris,
and with so few wild P.
vannamei
available (3%
of the population), the decision was made to
mature and mate wild P.
vannamei
at the
hatchery! In 1976, Joe Mountain, who was
working for us in Crystal River, came to Panama
to work on shrimp maturation, and in 1977, we
had a big breakthrough. We learned to produce
all the P.
stylirostris
we needed by
cutting off one of the female’s eyestalks
(ablation). However, ablation did not work as
well with P.
vannamei
because they were not getting the right diet.
Once the nutritional and environmental
requirements for maturing P.
vannamei
were satisfied,
ablation
worked and commercial quantities of good quality
nauplii produced. In 1978, the commercial
production of P.
stylirostris
was replaced with
P. vannamei.
In 1981, Purina closed the
research and development center in Crystal
River, Florida, expanded farm operations in
Panama, and began selling technology and
consulting in other countries. I continued to
consult with Agromarina while selling technology
for Ralston Purina International. At that time,
Purina had about 220 hectares of ponds. By
1986, they were up to 700 hectares.
That is when
Purina decided to sell the farm and many of its
other operations in Latin America.
Granada Corporation,
of Houston, Texas, purchased Agromarina,
and later, David Eller, one of Granada’s
principal investors, purchased Agromarina from
Granada. I continued to consult with Agromarina
from 1986 to 1988 and returned as vice president
of operations in 1989, at the request of the new
owners. When WSSV hit in 1999, Agromarina was
operating a
920-hectare farm and a hatchery that
produced 40–50 million postlarvae per month.
When whitespot hit, in
retrospect, a decision should have been made to
minimize spending until whitespot was under
control. Instead, the company continued to
invest money ($2 million) to develop a super
intensive culture system that could produce
shrimp in the presence of whitespot and a
$500,000 broodstock facility designed to produce
a disease tolerant animal. The broodstock
facility was state-of-the-art and produced
around 3,000 to 6,000 broodstock a month from
the survivors of repeated whitespot challenges.
Unfortunately, when the bank sequestered
Agromarina, the farm closed and the broodstock
animals were lost.
In February 1999, Dr. Paul
Frelier came to Panama to help a small farm that
thought it had Taura virus. All its animals
were dying. Paul, who had diagnosed whitespot
at Harlingen Shrimp Farms in Texas in 1995,
looked at the animals and immediately guessed
that they had whitespot. Paul does not believe
PCR tests are reliable for detecting whitespot.
He ran some histological tests on the animals
and they were positive for whitespot.
In March 1999, Drs. Flegel and
Fegan from Thailand were in Panama for,
ironically, a conference on how to keep
whitespot out of Panama. Although whitespot was
present on all of the farms checked, most shrimp
were not dying from it. Not all the farms would
let them into their facilities. Two or three
weeks after the visit, mass mortalities hit 90%
of the farms in Panama. At Agromarina,
survivals dropped to 20 to 45%. With each
succeeding crop, the survival rate continued to
drop. During the 2000 dry season (January
through April), survivals went back up to 20 to
25% again. When the rainy season began (May
through December), survivals dropped back to 12
to 15%. Of the nine thousand hectares of shrimp
ponds in Panama, five thousand of them are near
Agromarina, and they are the farms that were hit
the hardest. Farms that are having the best
success are those with small ponds and intensive
management. Over time, survivals have
improved. In July 2001, they were over 40%.
Agromarina de Panama, S. A.,
ceased to operate as a company in January 2001
and the assets were passed to So T Chea (Captain
Charlie’s Seafood) of Houston, Texas, at a
public auction in April 2001. William R. More
is no longer associated in any way with the
company.
Information:
Bill More, Aquaculture
Certification Council, Inc., 12815 72nd Avenue,
Northeast, Kirkland, WA 98034 USA (phone
425-825-8634, fax 425-671-0146, email wrmore@comcast.net,
webpage http://www.aquaculturecertification.org/index.html).
On June 30, 2004, I interviewed
Jim Heerin, co-chairman of Sea Farms
International, Inc., the management company for
one of the largest shrimp farming operations in
the Western Hemisphere. I asked Jim about his
37 years in shrimp farming and the history of
Sea Farms International, which operates research
facilities in the United States and hatcheries,
processing plants and shrimp farms in Venezuela
and Honduras. Its primary holdings are in
Honduras where it has over 16,000 acres of
shrimp ponds.
Shrimp News:
Tell me a little about your
education and how you got started in shrimp
farming?
Jim Heerin:
I graduated from the University
of Pennsylvania and then the University of
Connecticut Law School. In 1965 after finishing
a stint in the Air Force, I joined a law firm in
Philadelphia, in the corporate department. One
of my early assignments was to form a company
for a client of the firm, Bill Hannum, who had
developed an interest in shrimp farming.
While vacationing in the Florida
Keys, Bill had observed shrimp passing between
the islands in the Keys and thought it might be
possible to farm them. His early interest
turned into an avocation and he eventually
decided to attempt it on a full time basis. In
1966 he raised about $250,000 from friends and
neighbors in the Philadelphia area and came to
my law firm to form a company to do research and
development in shrimp farming. The more senior
people in our department thought it was a
bizarre idea, so as the new kid on the block, I
got the job, and on September 21, 1966, Sea
Farms, Inc., was incorporated in Delaware. That
was some time ago, so what follows is my best
recollection after reviewing what records I
still have.
The company purchased two small
islands in the Florida Keys. On one, Tarpon
Belly Key, we dug two canals about 100 feet
wide, 500 feet long and about 20 feet deep and
netted off the ends. If you tried to do that
today, you would probably be put in jail, but
back then, the rules were more permissive and we
were able to get permits for all the work. In
the beginning, we netted juvenile pink shrimp,
Penaeus duorarum,
and stocked them in the canals.
While still employed by the law
firm, I served as general counsel and
secretary of Sea Farms. I attended the
directors’, shareholders’ and other meetings,
took the minutes
and gradually developed a good
relationship with Bill and the other directors
and investors. Bill retired in Key West in the
mid 1970s and eventually returned to
Pennsylvania. We lost touch with each other by
the early 1980s, and he has since passed away.
Bill was a true pioneer of the business.
In 1968 Sea Farms purchased
Thompson Enterprises, a long-established fishing
company in Key West. This gave Sea Farms a land
base for operations and provided some financial
support for our shrimp farming research.
At about the same time, Marifarms,
another one of the early shrimp farming
operations in the United States, netted off a
bay in the Florida Panhandle. It stocked shrimp
in the bay and harvested them with a small
trawler. I’m not sure who got started first,
but I think we were in business a couple of
months ahead of them, making us one of the first
companies in the United States that was formed
to farm shrimp.
Also during this period Ralston
Purina got involved in shrimp farming research.
I believe the initial impetus was its interest
in the shrimp feed business. In 1968/69,
Ralston built a shrimp research facility in
Crystal River, Florida. Over the next few
years, particularly after I moved to Key West in
1971, I met most of the people involved with
Ralston, including Dennis Zensen, who was in
charge of the project early on, Bill MacGrath,
Yoshi Hirono, Bill More, Padge Beasley, John
Bargate and Harvey Persyn. We all enjoyed and
benefited from a free exchange of ideas about
shrimp farming.
Also in the late 1960s,
Armour/United Fruit Company had a shrimp farming
joint venture on the north coast of Honduras,
where it was raising P. occidentalis
under the management of Jerry
Broom, who reported some very encouraging
results in some small scale tests. I recall
that these tests had considerable impact on the
feasibility of shrimp farming as a commercial
enterprise.
In 1968 Sea Farms hired Don Sweat
as its first director of aquaculture, and in
1969 constructed a lab and research facilities
in Key West on the land acquired with Thompson
Enterprises. Billy Drummond and Linda Davis
joined Don as assistants, and the three of them
got the true research project started. Don was
another important early player in the business.
They started sourcing gravid duorarum
off Key West.
Through the acquisition of Thompson Enterprises,
we acquired a fleet of shrimp boats. On one of
the boats, we installed aerated holding tanks
and taught the captain how to catch and identify
gravid females. The gravids were brought into
the lab, spawned, and the larvae were raised in
large, rectangular concrete tanks. The
postlarvae or juveniles were subsequently
harvested and stocked in the canals in
the Keys.
We weren’t the only ones with a
shrimp hatchery at that time. Marifarms had
one, Ralston had one and so did the University
of Miami, under the direction of Tom Costello.
I think Tom was one of the first academicians
involved in shrimp farming.
We got pretty good at growing
pink shrimp postlarvae, most likely because we
had great water. We had a well that had
hydrogen sulfide in it. When we bubbled it off,
the resulting water was virtually sterile.
There’s nothing like good water quality at a
hatchery, as we learned later. We had good luck
spawning the shrimp and raising the larvae, but
we weren’t getting good results in the growout
canals. The shrimp were probably getting out
through the nets at the ends of the canals, or
fish that we could not keep out of the canals
were eating them. We had little tangible to
show for all the money we spent, but we were
learning a lot about shrimp farming.
In 1968, when Sea Farms bought
Thompson Enterprises, we brought in additional
shareholders, some from the Philadelphia area,
and some investment companies also became
shareholders. Those were the days when venture
capital was popular and companies were looking
for exciting new investments, such as
aquaculture.
By 1969 we had a working hatchery
in Key West and the canals on the island, but we
weren’t showing much progress with growout in
the canals. So in 1970 we bought a piece of
property on Summerland Key, where we built
eleven one-eighth acre ponds and began stocking
the ponds as well as the canals. Survivals
improved dramatically in the ponds, though
growth was slower than we had hoped. We learned
a great deal about stocking, feeding and
husbandry, but being belowground
ponds in the
coral of the Florida Keys, they were very
difficult to harvest. As fast as we pumped the
water out, it would seep back in. We were
learning as we went. Duorarum
proved to be a very hardy animal, easy to spawn
and easy to raise in the hatchery. We thought
we were home free, but as it turned out,
duorarum
was not a good animal in growout. It never
produced good yields in ponds.
During this time, we were working
with Ralston Purina on feed studies, and from
them we heard about work being done with white
shrimp species native to the Pacific coast of
Central America. In 1971 we entered into a
joint venture hatchery project with Ralston
Purina in the Republic of Panama. We rented
National Geographic Magazine’s
marine lab in Panama. The idea was to source
gravid shrimp, spawn them at the hatchery and
ship the larvae to our stateside hatcheries.
Dave Drennan was in charge of the operation. We
operated the joint venture with Ralston for
about two years. We actually obtained a joint
patent with Ralston for the long distance
shipment of shrimp larvae.
In 1971 I left the law firm and
joined Sea Farms full-time as executive vice
president. Sea Farms made the offer in the
winter of 1970. You know what the winters are
like in the Northeast. It was an offer I
couldn’t refuse. So in June 1971, my wife, Sue,
and I packed up our two young sons and moved to
Key West.
By 1972 we had pretty much
decided that we could raise shrimp in captivity,
but we didn’t think it could be done
commercially in the United States because
temperatures restricted year round growth,
suitable land was too expensive, and
environmental restrictions were already becoming
a factor. The board of directors and investors
agreed, and we began to look for sites outside
the United States. For shrimp farming to be
profitable, we felt it would need to be
conducted within twenty degrees of the equator.
With Don Sweat in charge, we began to look at
sites in Latin America. Don and others traveled
all over Central America and northern South
America searching for the right site. After a
long process of elimination, we narrowed it down
to two sites, one in Nicaragua and one in
Honduras, both on the Pacific side. We
eliminated Nicaragua largely because of what we
viewed as the overly acquisitive tentacles of
the Somoza government, which we thought would be
in power forever. A good example of making the
right decision for the wrong reason.
In April 1973, we formed Sea
Farms De Honduras (SFH) and signed a long-term
lease with private landowners in Honduras for
approximately 1,200 acres. About 130 acres of
this land had been used as salt evaporation
ponds, which we easily converted into our first
shrimp ponds. We hired Jerry Broom and Billy
Drummond as our first on-site managers in
Honduras and started construction of a hatchery.
When we first set up operations,
toward the end of 1973, we wanted to do a little
show and tell for the local community members,
many of whom I’m sure thought we were CIA agents
running some sort of secret lab. Since the
hatchery was not yet operational, we netted
shrimp (probably stylirostris)
out of the estuary, stocked a few of the ponds
and grew them out. They did marvelously. We
harvested the ponds and had an impressive shrimp
feast with the local dignitaries. After that,
we did not use wild stock for about seven years.
It was not scientific enough.
For those seven years, we struggled with the
hatchery. We had water quality problems,
diseases—fungi, bacteria, viruses, who knows
what—and we didn’t know how to deal effectively
with them at the time. In 1974 we hired Jim
Norris as hatchery manager and he spent almost a
decade fighting his way up the learning curve
and in the process becoming, in my opinion at
least, the finest hatchery manager in this
hemisphere. Jim is still with Sea Farms
International as head of our genetics research
and development operation in Florida.
In 1974 Billy Drummond and Jerry
Broom left Sea Farms and went to work for the
Maricultura project in Costa Rica. We hired
Chuck Hamlin as general manager and Bill Rudd as
construction and services manager, as their
replacements, and they, along with Jim Norris,
formed the management team that really got SFH
established firmly in Honduras.
At about the same time, Ralston
Purina started its Agromarina farm in Aquadulce,
Panama. Bill More was general manager and Yoshi
Hirono was technical director. We worked
closely with Ralston, especially Bill MacGrath
who was in charge of Ralston’s aquaculture
projects at that time.
In 1973 I was named president of
Sea Farms. Within a year, the conventional
fishing business that Sea Farms operated in Key
West and elsewhere was affected adversely by the
oil embargo, resulting recession and
overexpansion in South America and Key West, and
by other factors (not including, I like to
think, my stewardship).
Accordingly, in 1975, we
transferred the shrimp farming assets, including
SFH, into a new company, Shrimp Culture, Inc.
(SCI). I became president of SCI as well as
continuing with Sea Farms, Inc., where my only
task was to sell the conventional fishing
assets, which we were able to do in 1976 to
Singleton Shrimp Company. Since then I’ve
concentrated on shrimp farming.
From 1973 to nearly the end of
the decade, we struggled with water quality
problems at the SFH hatchery in Honduras.
Located away from the coast, up an estuary, it
was, in hindsight, simply not a good location
for a shrimp hatchery. By developing a water
filtration and improvement system nearly large
enough to serve the city of Los Angeles, we were
able to attain good enough water quality to
continue our efforts. We weren’t doing any
maturation at this time. Using two trawlers, we
sourced gravid females from the Gulf of Fonseca,
brought the females into the hatchery, spawned
them, grew the spawns through to postlarvae and
stocked the postlarvae in the ponds.
In 1976 Padge Beasley joined us
as pond manager, and we began to see gradual
improvement in growout. Within a couple of
years, after almost ten years of research and
development, we were beginning to produce
significant amounts of shrimp—not commercial
quantities, but we had a system that worked.
During the 1970s we brought all
our technical people in from the United States.
We considered what we were doing as technology;
shrimp farming was “black box” at the time. We
didn’t think the future was in a concept where
you harvested juvenile shrimp from the estuary
or coastline and stocked them in ponds. The
hatchery end of the business we believed to be
one of our big selling points. We were trying
to demonstrate the scientific way of doing
shrimp farming.
As a result, by 1979 we had
eleven, non-Honduran families living at the site
in Honduras. We had a little community, a
primary school with an American schoolteacher,
volleyball court, and all the neighborhood
“issues” you would have in a small subdivision.
Jim Norris, Chuck Hamlin, Bill Rudd, Padge
Beasley, Ralph Parkman, Bill McGrath, Ben
Ribelen—all had families with them during their
tours, so we had to have facilities for them.
We were located on the Pacific coast of Honduras
at a remote site on the Gulf of Fonseca, a
45-minute drive from Choluteca, three hours
south of Tegucigalpa, the capital, which itself
is rather remote.
In 1979 Chuck Hamlin transferred
to Nicaragua to look for new sites, and I hired
Bill MacGrath from Ralston Purina to take his
place. The same year, Ralph Parkman, now CEO at
Sea Farms International, was hired as Padge
Beasley’s assistant pond manager.
Ralph began his aquaculture
career in 1972-75 in the Peace Corp in El
Salvador, working to implement talapia
production on family farms. After that, he
completed his graduate work at Auburn University
in 1977, and then spent two years with ConAgra’s
catfish operations. ConAgra was an investor in
SCI then, and we were fortunate to learn about
Ralph and persuade him that the south coast of
Honduras was at least as attractive as the
Mississippi delta. It may have helped that
Ralph had met his wife Norma while in El
Salvador and this was a whole lot closer to home
for her. Ralph was in Honduras for over nine
years and has made a tremendous contribution to
SFI over the years.
In 1979 Ben Ribelin
was hired to head up a maturation
program at SFH. By 1982 we were relying
entirely on wild stock for our ponds, so we
closed the hatchery at SFH and Ben moved back to
the Keys where he continued to develop our
maturation system at the Summerland Key hatchery
we had refurbished for that purpose. This
continued until 1985, when we closed the
Summerland hatchery for a period of time.
In mid-1980 we shifted our
strategy. We needed to generate some cash. We
didn’t shut the door on the hatchery, but we did
go back to stocking wild seed so we could get
commercial sacle production from the farm. That
decision, based primarily on the encouragement
of Bill MacGrath, turned out to be very wise.
It allowed us to reduce the research staff and
lower expenses. In 1980 we shifted from an R&D
company to a commercial business with about
1,000 acres in production, most of it built
between 1978 and 1980.
In 1981 we opened an
administrative office in Miami, and Bill
MacGrath left Honduras and moved to Florida to
run it.
After we closed the SFH hatchery
in 1982, we showed steady growth using all wild
seedstock (stylirostris)
through 1985.
In 1983 we entered into a joint
venture with Santiago Maspons to develop a farm
in Ecuador. SCI had a 49% interest in that
project for about four years, and then sold its
interest back to Santiago, primarily because we
were pursuing different strategies.
We were pleased enough with our
progress that in 1984 we formed Granjas Marinas
San Bernardo, a new Honduran company with local
shareholders, negotiated a lease from the
Honduran government of about 15,000 acres—and
began to build ponds. SCI was a major
shareholder. By the end of 1984, the new San
Bernardo farm had 1,200 acres of ponds. By 1986
we had about 3,700 acres of ponds and were
producing about 3 million pounds of shrimp a
year.
In 1987 we acquired and renovated
an existing facility as our first processing
plant, Empacadora San Lorenzo. By 1990 we had
5,000 acres of ponds and were producing about 5
million pounds of shrimp a year.
Those were good years for the
growth of our company. By 1993 we had 9,000
acres of ponds and produced 9 million pounds of
shrimp. In 1988 we had reactivated our hatchery
in Summerland Key, Florida, which had been
mothballed for several years. With our pond
expansions, we needed a more reliable supply of
postlarvae than we were getting from the wild
stock. We still had the original hatchery
facilities in Honduras, but with the water
quality issues and the state-of-the-art at the
time, it was more efficient to operate a
hatchery in the Florida Keys and fly the
seedstock to Honduras, which we did for a good
many years. In fact, we only stopped doing that
a couple of years ago. Our new hatchery and
maturation facilities in Honduras, which are
located on the Gulf of Fonseca where the water
quality is much better than it was at our
original facilities on the estuary, are able to
supply all our needs with improved postlarvae,
and we no longer source any of our shrimp from
the wild.
Another important milestone in
the early 1990s was formation of Shrimp Culture
Technologies (SCT), a joint venture between SCI
and Dr. Rolland Laramore to develop and
commercialize new technologies. Subsequently,
SCI acquired Rolland’s interest in SCT and he
became SCI’s Director of Research and
Development.
In Honduras, we instituted a
labor relations program that was developed in
Costa Rica called “Solidarity”. Basically it is
a self-governing, employee association where
both management and labor are represented. It
has worked out very well. The association has
grown to the point that it now provides food
service and bus transportation for the employees
and trash collection and recycling for our
facilities—and it gets paid for all of these
services. It operates a cooperative store that
we believe is the best stocked and most
reasonably priced outlet in the Choluteca area.
The Association pays dividends to its members,
provides loans and a medical program and
organizes social and cultural events for members
and the local community. Labor relations can
sometimes be adversarial in Latin America.
Thanks in large part to the Solidarity program
and an effective management team led by Carlos
Lara, we have never lost a day to labor strife
in Honduras. It has never been an
us-against-them situation. It’s been a
wonderful win-win for the company and our
employees.
In 1992 we brought in additional
local investors and merged the San Bernardo
farm, Sea Farms de Honduras and other farms
owned by some of the San Bernardo shareholders
into one company, Grupo Granjas Marinas (GGM).
Up to this point, we had never had a serious
disease problem in the ponds. Once we stocked
the animals from the hatcheries or estuary into
the ponds, they grew at about a gram a week with
70% survival. We harvested them, we processed
them and we sold them. We had arrived in the
land of milk and honey.
Then in 1994 we began to notice a
sharp drop in survivals, from 70%, to 60%, to
50%, all the way down to below 20%. We were on
the slippery slope and headed south. At the
time, Dr. Rolland Laramore was the head of our
research operation in Vero Beach, Florida. I
asked him what was going on. Rolland assured me
that whatever was killing the shrimp would not
kill all of them because if it did, it would not
survive. He said overall survivals would
probably not fall below 5%. He was trying to
reassure me, but this was not much reassurance.
The Taura virus had arrived. We
got hit hard and spent the next six years
reducing costs and learning to live with and
manage around Taura. Slowly, over the next
several years, we began to see some
improvement. By 1998 survivals had risen to 40%
and we had reduced our costs significantly.
By October 1998, we were getting
back to normal and anticipating a big harvest
when Hurricane Mitch arrived.
In mid-1999 the GGM shareholders
formed Sea Farms International, Ltd, in the
Cayman Islands, to serve as the holding company
for existing and future investments in our
shrimp aquaculture business
worldwide.
Later in 1999 as we were
continuing to recover from Taura, along came the
whitespot virus, which I am glad to say did not
hit us as hard as Taura. Whitespot seems to be
a problem only when water temperatures drop in
the winter.
In 2000, SFI made its first
investment in Venezuela. We needed to diversify
geographically. We have about 16,000 acres of
ponds in Honduras, all in the same general
location, making us vulnerable to disasters like
Taura and Mitch. Venezuela to date has not had
significant virus problems! In Venezuela, we
have higher survivals, like those we had in
Honduras pre-Taura.
At our research facilities in
Vero Beach, Florida, we have a genetic
improvement program. We have maturation and
hatchery facilities in Venezuela and Honduras
and no longer fly larvae out of Florida. We no
longer stock wild seedstock, and we don’t use
antibiotics during the hatchery or growout
phases. In Honduras, we are testing our
specific pathogen free and specific pathogen
resistant animals.
We
hope to implement a similar program in Venezuela
to assure long term viability of the industry
and are working with the government on that.
Information:
Jim Heerin, Sea Farms
International, Ltd., 765 Lullwater Road,
Atlanta, GA 30307 USA (phone 404-377-2233, fax
404-377-0978, email
jheerin@jdstg.com).
At the Fourth Latin American
Aquaculture Congress and Exhibition (Panama,
October 2000), I interviewed David Drennan, a
shrimp aquaculture specialist, at the time
head-quartered in Panama, currently managing a
shrimp hatchery in the Dominican Republic.
Drennan owns many firsts in shrimp farming.
Just to peak your interest, in May 1973, he was
the first person to spawn
Penaeus vannamei!
Shrimp News:
How did you get into shrimp farming?
David Drennan:
In 1967, after
graduating from the University of Miami, while I
was taking some postgraduate courses, I got
involved with the Turkey Point Shrimp Project.
Turkey Point was the nuclear power plant that
produced Miami’s electricity. It wanted to use
the warm water from the cooling towers to farm
shrimp (P. duorarum). During one
growout trial, a cold front came through and the
shrimp burrowed 5–6 inches into the mud bottom.
For the next two months, whenever the weather
warmed up, a few more shrimp would pop up from
the bottom.
One of my classmates, Yoshi
Hirono (currently a shrimp farming consultant)
was also working at Turkey Point. It was an
interesting project, and I easily became
immersed in it. With the guidance of Drs.
Claire Idyll, Durbin Tab and Ed Iverson, we
captured wild duorarum,
stocked them in ponds and tested them as growout
candidates. During this period, my father, Dr.
L. M. Drennan, who worked as medical director
for Chiquita Banana, gave me the inside track on
a shrimp farming job in Honduras, a joint
venture between Chiquita and Armour Co. Jerry
Broom, formerly with the Louisiana Department of
Wildlife and Fisheries, was hired to manage the
project, and I took a job working for Jerry, as
a liaison between the project and Chiquita.
Eric Heald, a Ph.D. from the University of
Miami, was also on the staff. Harold Weber, a
consultant for Groton Associates and a good
friend of Jerry and Eric, more or less brokered
the project.
I grew up in the tropics, spoke
Spanish and had previously lived in Honduras, so
it was great fun pulling this project
together—and all the while becoming increasingly
fascinated by shrimp.
The project got rolling in late
1968, in Tulian, on Honduras’s Atlantic coast.
But by 1970 it was up for sale because Chiquita
and Armour were taken over by companies that did
not want to face the high development costs of a
new industry like shrimp farming. During the
two years of operations, we worked mainly with
white shrimp (setiferous)
from Florida and some brown shrimp
(aztecus)
that we got from Harvey Persyn (currently chief
executive officer of Tropical Mariculture
Technology, a shrimp farming consulting
company), who at the time was working for Dow
Chemical in Texas.
Since I had also lived in Panama,
I volunteered to go to the Pacific Coast of
Panama to source shrimp species that might be
right for farming in Honduras. I made two
sourcing (fishing) trips to Panama, one with
Eric Heald and one by myself. I shipped some
gravid occidentalis
to the Turkey
Point Hatchery, which spawned them and shipped
the postlarvae
to Honduras. Not many shrimp
survived, but those that did grew incredibly
fast. We stocked them in February 1969. Some
reached 27 grams in less than 50 days. By
summer, they reached 100 grams. They spawned
naturally in the ponds, and I hatched the eggs
in a small makeshift lab. As the nauplii molted
through their five stages, I made drawings.
I knew that Yoshi Hirono had just
gone to work for Ralston Purina in Crystal
River, Florida, and that Purina might be
interested in purchasing the Chiquita/Armour
project. Yoshi came down to Honduras with
Ralston Purina’s Dennis Zensen to appraise the
farm. Purina decided not to buy the project,
but after seeing my drawings of occidentalis
larvae and listening to me talk
about the potential of shrimp farming, they
offered me a job. I had “hands on experience”,
which Purina valued. I accepted the job in
1971, sealing my fate in shrimp farming for the
next thirty years.
Bill More, project director at
Purina’s Crystal River, Florida, shrimp research
facility, asked me if I wanted to work in
Crystal River. I told him that I thought Panama
would be a better spot for me because I knew the
area—and I knew how to set up a sourcing program
for female shrimp there. The growth of the
occidentalis
in Honduras had really bedazzled me!
For two and a half years I was
Purina’s man in Panama. At the time nobody knew
much about penaeid shrimp on the Pacific Coast
of Central and South America. I sourced shrimp
there from February 1972 to late 1973. Early
on, I could not determine if the females
(occidentalis)
had mated or not. Then one day, I detected a
small blob of crystal-colored gel next to a
female’s thelycum (genitalia). Hmmmm…. It
turned out to be the remnants of a
spermatophore. Now, finally, I knew what to
look for, females with attached spermatophores,
or parts of spermatophores. They had mated.
They were the ones that produced fertile eggs.
My first work was with
occidentalis,
which accounts for around 85% of the commercial
catch of white shrimp off the Pacific Coast of
Panama. Stylirostris
accounts for 12%–15% and vannamei
for 1–3%. One of the top guys at
Purina called me “the shrimp hunter”. He was
right, I loved hunting gravid female shrimp on
the open seas at night.
I kept them from spawning by
lowering the water temperature in their tanks to
about 18ºC. Then, I would pack them up and put
them on an early morning flight that arrived at
the Crystal River, Florida, hatchery at 4 p.m.
I was putting in 16-hour days, but it was easy
work for me—I was driven.
Most of the females aborted
during the flight to Miami. I needed to develop
a better system. I tried shipping the eggs, but
that didn’t work. Finally, after a lot of trial
and error, I discovered that shipping nauplii
(the first larval stage after hatching from the
egg) worked best. I put the nauplii (stage-3)
in oxygenated, double plastic bags and then
packed the bags in styrofoam boxes for
shipment. I set up a little spawning area at
the Smithsonian’s Research Station on the Naos
Island, where I hatched the eggs and collected
the nauplii. That was at the beginning of
1973. I was Purina’s one man show in Panama,
politician, businessman, biologist—and hunter.
By this time, the beginning of 1973, shrimp
farming was in my blood, a lifetime infirmity, I
fear.
The Smithsonian’s Dr. Ira
Rubinoff graciously provided me with a
fiberglass-over-cardboard building to serve as a
temporary lab.
One night, I was shrimping in a
new area and caught a female Penaeus vannamei—with
a spermatophore attached! I had captured males
and females of this species before, but this was
my first mated female. Knowing that she was
different, I kept her in a separate tank,
spawned her, hatched the eggs and sent the
nauplii to Purina’s hatchery in Crystal River,
Florida. These nauplii were different from
other penaeids; they had a small red dot right
in the center of the embryo.
Of the 250,000 naups that
survived the trip, Bill More and Harvey Persyn
stocked 75,000 postlarvae in a half-acre pond
and sent 75,000 to Jack Parker at the Texas
Mariculture Station in Palacios, Texas. He
stocked them in a half-acre pond, too. Early
on, in Florida, the growth was great, about a
gram a week, but no one paid much attention to
them.
In Texas, Jack was doing a little
demonstration harvest for a bunch of Fish and
Wildlife officials, and to everyone’s amazement,
he pulled 2,000 pounds of shrimp out of the
half-acre pond.&nbs
