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. And lo and behold—the same
thing happened in Florida, a harvest of over
2,000 pounds from a half-acre pond, on the first
try. We were off to the “shrimp races”.
I had to source more vannamei.
Vannamei
makes up such a
small percentage of the penaeids off Panama that
I didn’t recognize them the first time I saw
their distinctive white legs
(patiblancos).
I had to go to the Smithsonian’s library in
Panama to identify them. Eventually we
discovered the best places, seasons and hours to
fish them. Sometimes they were as scarce as
hen’s teeth.
In early 1973, I started looking
for farm sites in Panama. I found a large salt
flat on the Gulf of Parita that I thought would
be a good location for a shrimp farm because
there were no mangroves or trees on it, and the
area was not being used for anything else. The
clearing cost would be negligible. So I flew
over the site, took some pictures and sent them
up to Crystal River, where they mulled over
things for awhile and then came down to have a
look. Everyone agreed that it was a great site
for a shrimp farm. In 1974 we started
Agromarina de Panama, S.A., with a 12-acre pilot
farm in Aguadulce. Everyone also agreed that we
needed a hatchery, so, also in 1974, we started
a hatchery in Veracruz. My job was sourcing
females and helping with the hatchery.
Bill More was general manager;
Ron Staha, hatchery manager; and Padge Beasley,
farm manager. Initially, we farmed
stylirostris,
with good
results the first year, but the next year, 1975,
we got hit with IHHNV, a viral disease that
causes very high mortalities in
stylirostris.
It killed 89% of the juveniles in the nursery
ponds. Vannamei
were more resistant, but did show numerous
deformities from the virus. Since
vannamei
became our prime candidate for culture, we knew
we would have to start breeding them. Soooo…we
put some adult vannamei
in maturation tanks and observed their
behavior. The males would pursue the females,
but matings seldomly occurred because most of
the females were very slow mature.
About this time, Joe Mountain
(Pepe) was hired, and it was Joe who came up
with the idea of pinching off one eyestalk
(glands in the eyes produce a hormone that
inhibits egg production in penaeid shrimp).
This caused the females to mature when we fed
them marine worms (polychaetes, bloodworms,
natural foods for wild shrimp). We fed worms,
squid and Purina’s dry MR-25 diet to the shrimp
and lo and behold, the females started to
develop eggs. Better yet, we started to get
matings, but not all the time. At one point to
get their juices flowing, I collected
spermatophores from wild-caught occidentalis
and
stylirostris,
mashed them all
together, and threw them into the
vannamei
maturation tanks. Sometimes this excited the
males so much that they would miss the female’s
thelycum and attach their spermatophores to
their legs, heads and bodies—and even to each
other.
We brought penaeid maturation
under control in 1976, primarily out of
necessity, because vannamei
were so difficult to find in the wild.
Agromarina de Panama, which changed hands and
names in 2001, nurtured some great shrimp
farmers. Here I would like to recognize some of
my fellow workers: Bill More, Peter Van Wyk,
Glen Bieber, Joe Mountain, Harvey and Amber
Persyn, Yoshi Hirono, Frank Follet, Padge
Beasley, Ron Staha, Billy Durmond, Rolland
Laramore, Durwood Dugger, Ron Wulff, Bill
McGrath, Reggie Markam, Randy Aungst, Franklin
Kaiwben, Freddy Cherigo, N.G. Ovidio and Gonzalo
Sanchez. We were blessed because Ralston Purina
was willing to do the project right, which gave
us the opportunity to bring together the
talent. Later, Ron Staha and Yoshi Hirono left
the project, and in 1980, I became the hatchery
manager in Veracruz. I have always enjoyed
designing and working in shrimp laboratories.
One of my most memorable sourcing
trips was with Dr. Isabel Farfante, a
distinguished shrimp researcher and coauthor of
Penaeoid and Sergestoid Shrimps and Prawns of
the World (Keys and Diagnoses for the Families
and Genera).
She was interested in sourcing and collecting
specimens to illustrate the reproductive system
of penaeid shrimp. On the night that she
accompanied me on a sourcing expedition, we
collected vannamei, stylirostris,
occidentalis
and one californiensis,
which was still soft from molting and carried a
spermatophore plug. When she was working on the
deck it was hard to imagine she was in her
sixties. In appreciation, she sent me a copy of
her original drawing of stylirostris’s
reproductive system.
I left Agromarina in 1990. In
1991, I did some consulting for Zeigler Bros., a
shrimp feed manufacturing company in
Pennsylvania, and then went to work for Zeigler
full-time. Basically, my job was to help
Zeigler make better shrimp feeds. Zeigler has
always been receptive to my suggestions and is
committed to shrimp nutrition from the womb to
the tomb.
I was also involved in the
inception and start-up of Belize Aquaculture,
Ltd., a high-tech, zero-exchange,
super-intensive shrimp farm. I designed the
pilot hatchery and recirculating maturation
facility and helped with the broodstock
program. We were the first hatchery to close
the breeding cycle for SPF vannamei
in Belize.
Recently, I successfully
completed work on the design of a broodsock
rearing facility at Farallon Aquaculture in
Panama capable of producing up to 40,000
broodstock a year. The goal at this facility is
to develope shrimp with fast growth, fecundity
and disease resistance.
Information
David Drennan, Apartado 550360 Paitilla, Panama
City, Panama (phone/fax in Panama 507-213-8363,
cell 507-635-2118, email panaqua_dd@cwpanama.net
and aquadpd@hotmail.com).
On May 12 & 13, 2000, I visited
Russell Allen, president of the United States
Shrimp Farming Association and a shrimp farming
consultant, in Okemos, Michigan, USA. I asked
Russ about his history in shrimp farming. When
I turned off the recorder two hours later, I had
captured a great story and some important
historical information on the development of
shrimp farming in the Western Hemisphere.
In 1970, while sailing around the
world, I arrived in the Galapagos Islands, liked
it there, and stayed six months. A couple of
years later, in 1973, after graduating from the
University of Michigan with a degree in
fisheries biology, I returned to Ecuador, bought
a 70-foot sailboat and began running chartered
tours in the Galapagos Islands. Peter Shayne
operated a shrimp processing plant in Guayaquil,
Ecuador, and we frequently bumped into each
other socially. Peter played a pivotal role in
the development of Ecuadorian shrimp farming!
In 1976, after running tours for
three years, I leased my boat to a travel agency
and suddenly found myself with a nice income and
nothing to do. Peter hired me as a biologist at
$400 a month. He was building his first farm in
Balao, on the eastern side of the Gulf of
Guayaquil, about midway between Guayaquil and
Machala. He hired two other biologists: Terry
McCarthy, an American, and Juan Villegas, a
Colombian (neither currently associated with
shrimp farming).
In the mid-1970s, Ecuador
exported eight to ten million pounds of shrimp a
year, 99% of it boat-caught. Farms produced
50,000 to 100,000 pounds. Empacadora Nacional,
owned by Harry Graham, another member of the
small American community in Guayaquil, was the
biggest processor. Harry had a huge shrimp
fishing fleet, probably more than fifty boats,
in a country with a total fleet of around a
hundred boats. Empacadora Shayne had four
boats. Peter realized that the only way to beat
the competition was to farm shrimp.
Although there were a few shrimp
farms around Machala and Guayaquil, we were the
first group to promote the development of shrimp
farming in Ecuador. Peter wanted to create a
system that would supply his plant exclusively.
The biologists—Terry, Juan and I—got the Balao
farm up and running, and then we tried to learn
something about feeding shrimp. We communicated
with Yoshe Hirono and Bill MacGrath (currently
shrimp farming consultants) at Ralston Purina,
USA, because Purina wanted to run feed trials in
Ecuador and compare the results with trials from
its shrimp farm in Panama, which, at the time,
had only 13 acres in phase-one development.
We went up to Agromarina de
Panama for a couple of weeks to learn how they
did things, and Yoshe taught us how to run the
feed trials. That’s when I first met Bill More,
who became general manager of the farm, one of
the largest and most successful in the Western
Hemisphere—certainly, one of the oldest. David
Drennan (currently managing a shrimp hatchery in
the Dominica Republic), Harvey Persyn (currently
a successful consultant who, at the time, was
working for Purina in Crystal River, Florida),
Ron Staha (currently manager of a large hatchery
in Panama) and Joseph Mountain (who had a long
career at Granjas Marinas San Bernardo in
Honduras, now the largest shrimp farm in the
Western Hemisphere) were all working for Purina.
Later, using Purina feeds, our
group introduced the first commercial shrimp
feeds in Ecuador.
After we built the Balao farm and
brought it into production, we used it as a
demonstration project to expand shrimp farming
in Ecuador. We trained the first postlarvae
collectors, not with push nets out in the ocean
but with canoes and dip nets in the local
estuaries. We didn’t know about the coastal
postlarvae resource. We taught the collectors
where to look for postlarvae, how to judge their
quality, how to identify them, how to count
them, how to acclimate them, and how to stock
them. In the beginning, that was ninety percent
of our job. The other farms in Ecuador pumped
water into their ponds and grew whatever
postlarvae came in with the water.
Peter made a deal with Purina to
import and sell feeds. Once a week, the
biologists would visit the farms, check growth
rates, set feeding schedules, and help the
farmers resolve problems. At harvest, we would
make sure the shrimp got to Peter’s plant,
pronto.
While the farms were getting
started, the processing plant needed more shrimp
to run efficiently. Peter’s Ecuadorian partner,
Carlos Vélez, hired people to go out at night in
canoes to buy shrimp from Empacadora Nacional
fishing boats, pay off the captains, and bring
the shrimp back to Empacadora Shayne. Peter
would pay them a good price, process it and
export it. Soon Empacadora Shayne processed
almost as much shrimp as Empacadora Nacional,
which had to deploy a patrol boat to protect its
fleet from the canoes. War-like conditions
existed between Empacadora Nacional and
Empacadora Shayne, Hatfield and McCoy stuff, in
boats, at night, off the coast of Ecuador, just
a few degrees south of the equator.
Back then, farmers were getting
up to $6 a pound for 31-35 count tails. That
was big money, and the reason the industry grew
so fast. In 1977, the shrimp farming industry
was so profitable and we were developing so many
farms that Peter divided the country into three
sectors. Terry got Machala; Juan got Guayaquil;
and I got Manabi, on the central Ecuadorian
coast. Peter and I flew up there for one day to
check things out, and I didn’t return for six
months. There was so much to do and so much
interest that I designed, built and advised most
of the farms in Bahia.
Because of the rapid growth of
the industry and the processor’s bidding war,
Peter started to pay too much for shrimp. His
credit line at the Bank of America in Guayaquil
began to deteriorate. To get the company moving
in the right direction would take some new
capital.
I was in Peter’s office the day
Ken Morrison, an agribusinessman from Nebraska,
USA, walked in and began negotiating a deal for
part of the operation. Peter, Ken and I spent
about three days together—dinners, tours of the
farms—discussing potential arrangements. Peter
owned the majority of Empacadora Shayne; Carlos
Vélez, a minority. Morrison bought Vélez’s
share and infused new capital into the
operation. Peter got money to build Granmar, a
big new farm near Salinas, and Semaqua, the
first shrimp hatchery in Ecuador, but he did not
have an ownership positions in them.
Peter, always the pirate, kept a
big commission on the money that was supposed to
go Vélez, so Vélez, who had planned to get out
of the shrimp business, bought a derelict
processing plant in Guayaquil and went into
competition with Empacadora Shayne. Since it
was Vélez who had established most of Empacadora
Shayne’s business with the Ecuadorian farmers,
it was easy for him to grab business from
Shayne.
By this time, the other biologist
and I had made a deal with Peter for a
commission on the production from the farms,
but, after the deal with Morrison went through,
Peter refused to pay. So, in one day, we moved
the entire team of biologists from Empacadora
Shayne to Marfrut, Vélez’s new company. When we
left, Peter hired Craig Emberson on the pond
side and David Curri in the hatchery—both still
active in shrimp farming.
We negotiated a deal with Marfrut
and went into competition with Empacadora Shayne
and Empacadora Nacional.
Later, Morrison bought Peter’s
share of Empacadora Shayne and changed its name
to Frescamar, S.A.
It wasn’t long until Marfrut was
the biggest exporter in Ecuador. Vélez decided
he wanted a farm as well. In order to staff it,
we needed an another biologist. On one of my
trips home to Michigan, I visited an old
professor at the University of Michigan and
interviewed two of his prize students: Alexander
“Zandy” deBeausset
(currently manager of a large shrimp farm in
Guatemala) and Mark Rosenblum (currently
president of the Super Shrimp Group, one of the
largest shrimp farming operations in the
world). Mark got the job. Eventually, Carlos’s
pirate skills got the best of him, our deal with
Marfrut ended, and I decided to leave Ecuador in
1979.
My wife, Liz, and I packed up all
our stuff, got rid of our apartment, and bought
tickets for the United States. As we were
leaving for the airport, the phone rang. Like a
fool, I answered it. It’s Diego Ribadeneira, a
big money guy in Guayaquil, saying he had
someone at his house who just flew in from
Hawaii that wanted to do a shrimp farm. He
talked me into to canceling the flight. A
couple of hours later, I’m in Ribadeneira’s
house having lunch with Art Lowe, an American
who owns a freshwater prawn (Macrobrachium
rosenbergii)
farm in Hawaii. He wants me to stay and do
this big new project in Ecuador, but I insist on
going back to the States. I’m outta Ecuador.
A week later, back in my home
state of Michigan, I start getting calls from
Art, who had sealed a shrimp farming deal with
Ribadeneira, saying: “You’ve got to help me with
the farm.” Art had a lot of experience with
freshwater prawns, but, at the time, the farm in
Hawaii, Lowe Aquafarms, had never grown marine
shrimp. Joe Tabra (now with the Oceanic
Institute in Hawaii), Jeff Peterson (now woring
of a shrimp project in Georgia, USA) and Nick
Carpenter (now with Belize Aquaculture) worked
for Art in Hawaii, but they were all freshwater
prawn guys. Ed Scura, a specialist in marine
shrimp farming (currently running a shrimp
hatchery in Florida), was their consultant and
helped start Lowe Aquafarms.
Anyway, Art offered me a deal I
couldn’t refuse, so I went back to Ecuador and
designed and built Aquaspecies, a big farm, near
the Taura River, about twenty miles southeast of
Guayaquil. I managed Aquaspecies from
1979-1981. The design incorporated most of what
I had learned about shrimp farming over the
previous three years.
When I left in early 1981, Joe
Tabra (currently manager of technology transfer
at the Oceanic Institutre in Hawaii) became
general manager and Jerome Thompson (currently a
shrimp farming consultant in Florida) became
farm manager. Later, Jeff Peterson (currently a
shrimp farming consultant in Florida) replaced
Thompson as farm manager. I had finally had
enough of Ecuador and I wanted to go where I
could do my own project, somewhere new and
exiting.
During my time in Ecuador, I
designed and built, and in some cases managed,
approximately 100,000 acres of semi-intensive
shrimp ponds.
While still working for
Aquaspecies and on vacation in Michigan, I again
visited my old fisheries professor at the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He said a
buddy of his named John Snell was interested in
shrimp farming. Snell lived in Lansing, home of
Michigan State University, so I paid him a
visit. He had 8,000 acres in Belize and wanted
to do a big shrimp farm. On our way back to
Ecuador, Liz and I stopped in Belize to check
out the site. Sure it was different from
Ecuador, but I didn’t see any reason why
semi-intensive shrimp farming couldn’t be done
there.
Liz and I went back to Guayaquil
and packed our bags for a final three-month stay
in the Galapagos before heading off to Belize.
I then signed a 50/50 deal with Snell. To get
the project started, we each put up some money;
he supplied the land, and I supplied the
expertise. In 1982, I built four, one-acre
pilot ponds to test local conditions, the first
semi-intensive ponds in Belize. Liz and I spent
a year there, lived the first five months in a
tent with no running water, no electricity, no
refrigeration, right in the middle of the
boondocks, no neighbors, no nothing, except lots
of bugs! We never saw Snell. I got postlarvae
from Aquaspecies in Ecuador, stocked the ponds,
grew them out, and proved that it could be
done. The plan for the next phase of
development was a 100-acre project.
Then Snell showed up with his own
plan. Instead of using the growth rates and
production figures for vannamei
in Belize,
he plugged
in figures for monodon
production in Taiwan. I told him that he didn’t
have to fiddle with the numbers to make it work,
but he insisted that the project be presented to
investors with his numbers. We parted ways. He
went on to develop a 300 to 400-acre project
with $10,000 to $20,000 investments from people
in Michigan. You can talk to people around here
today that were burned by Snell. He dumped
millions and millions into the project and lost
every penny because he just would not listen to
anybody.
In 1983, after splitting with
Snell, I got involved with Barry Bowen,
currently president of Belize Aquaculture, one
of the most advanced, environmentally-friendly,
shrimp farms in the world. In fact, in 1997, I
designed and built that farm, too! But that’s
another story.
Information:
Russell Allen, Aquatic Design, Ltd., 3450
Meridian Road, Okemos, MI 48863 USA (phone
517-347-5537, fax 517-347-4999, email
shrimpone@aol.com).
On February 2, 2002, I
interviewed Henry Clifford, who at the time was
Technical Director of Super Shrimp, which had
three mega shrimp hatcheries in Mexico, a large
shrimp farm in northern Mexico and a small
inland shrimp farm in Arizona, USA.
In April 2002, Henry resigned
from Super Shrimp and joined Shrimp Improvement
Systems, a Florida company that specializes in
selective breeding and genetic enhancement of
marine shrimp, as Technical Director.
Shrimp News:
Hi Henry. Tell me a little about
your first steps into aquaculture.
Henry Clifford:
I have a
bachelor’s degree in marine biology from the
University of Virginia (1972–1976) and received
a master’s degree on the nutritional physiology
of Macrobrachium from Texas A&M
University in 1979. My aquaculture career at
A&M blossomed when Dr. Bob Brick—who later
became vice president of Aquabiotics/King James,
one of the first attempts to raise shrimp in
closed systems in the United States—guided me
into shrimp culture. While at A&M, I set my
sights on getting a job with Ralston Purina
because I had read great things about Purina’s
shrimp farming division. Then, in December
1979, Harvey Persyn hired me to work at Purina’s
Mariculture Research Center, in Crystal River,
Florida, USA, a real hotbed of shrimp farming
research. By the time I got started at Crystal
River, Bill MacGrath, Yoshi Hirono and Padge
Beasley had already left for other shrimp
farming projects. And Joe Mountain, Ron Staha,
David Drennan and Bill More were working at
Purina’s shrimp venture in Panama, Agromarina de
Panama. Harvey put me in charge of nutrition
R&D and feed production. I formulated diets in
Crystal River, produced them at Purina’s feed
mills in St. Louis, tested them in Crystal River
and then shipped them down to the farm in
Panama. While at Crystal River, I also worked
with Reggie Markham and Randy Aungst, who have
enjoyed long, successful careers in shrimp
farming.
Two years later Ralston Purina
decided they no longer needed the Crystal River
Research Facility and closed it down, a crushing
blow to me because I had aspired to work there
for many, many years. The technical staff split
into two groups. Randy Aungst and Joe Mountain
followed a former Purina executive into Asia and
set up shrimp farming projects in Sri Lanka and
Malaysia. Harvey and I founded Tropical
Mariculture Technology (TMT), a shrimp farming
consulting company, with Reggie Markham as one
of our biologists.
Shrimp News:
Was it difficult to find work?
Henry Clifford:
No. At the time, we had
knowledge of Purina’s advanced shrimp culture
technology. We had the maturation technology
that Joe Mountain and Harvey Persyn developed.
We had larval rearing technology. We had
nutrition and pond management technology. We
had the feed formulations. We really had a
complete package of technology to offer
investors. We started with small assignments in
Ecuador, Malaysia and the Philippines. We did
site surveys in Asia, Africa and South America.
Among other assignments, we selected the site
for the Baltek Corporation (a publicly traded
U.S. corporation, which got out of the shrimp
farming business in 2003) shrimp farm in
Ecuador.
TMT’s first big project was the
Maricultura da Bahia farm and hatchery in
Brazil. At the time, Brazil’s shrimp farming
industry was floundering, trying to grow native
species and some Penaeus japonicus
that had been
imported into the northeast. No one was having
much success. Using our technology, we managed
to industrialize shrimp farming in Brazil, and
promoted the idea of self-sufficiency in
maintaining closed-cycle stocks of shrimp. We
introduced P. vannamei
and
P. stylirostris
to Brazil and
began the domestication process with them. We
also imported monodon
and
penicillatus
from the Tungkang Marine Science Center in
Taiwan, and used them into our domestication
process. All of the shrimp stocked in the ponds
at Maricultura were from our closed-cycle,
domestication program. In fact, dating back to
1980, probably my proudest accomplishment in
shrimp farming is the fact I have only worked
with domesticated lines of shrimp. None of the
farms where I worked stocked wild postlarvae.
Maricultura da Bahia was one of
the first companies in the Western Hemisphere to
pond-rear stylirostris
and
vannamei
broodstock, and we might have been one of the
first companies in the world to pond-rear
monodon
broodstock. We were growing monodon
broodstock
in ponds in 1984, at a time when people were
saying you couldn’t grow good quality broodstock
in ponds—especially monodon
broodstock.
When we left Brazil, the farm had third
generation monodon,
sixth
generation vannamei,
eighth
generation stylirostris,
and fourth
generation penicillatus.
As far as I know, the penicillatus
that we imported into Brazil in 1984 are still
there—approaching their fortieth generation of
domestication, probably the oldest line of
domesticated shrimp in the world, older than
Super Shrimp’s stylirostris
and older than the French’s SPR 43 line of
stylirostris.
Shrimp News:
Who is maintaining the stocks of
penicillatus?
Henry Clifford:
Although I’m
not sure, I believe they are all in the hands of
one company that continues to procreate them.
Penicillatus did well in our
Brazil project, but it can’t compete with
vannamei.
Shrimp News:
What about the
monodon?
Henry Clifford:
We had good
success with maturation and larval rearing, but
we ran into problems during growout. We didn’t
have the right feeds for monodon
at the time, and so we could not get the animals
past 15–16 grams in a reasonable growout period.
Shrimp News:
Why did it take Brazil so long to
come around to
vannamei?
Henry Clifford:
Brazil wanted
to build its industry on indigenous species. At
Maricultura da Bahia, we changed all that. We
closed the life cycle in captivity of seven
species of penaeid shrimp: vannamei,
stylirostris, monodon, penicillatus, schmitti,
paulensis and aztecus.
We played around with paulensis
because it
tolerated lower temperatures better than the
other species. But of the seven species, it was
the least successful on our farm.
Paulensis
is still being used on some farms in the
temperate regions of southern Brazil, but
vannamei
remains the dominant species in Brazil.
Shrimp News:
Did TMT have an ownership
position in any of the farms it developed in
Brazil?
Henry Clifford:
No. We were technical advisors,
providing design, construction supervision,
start-up and technical management services. We
had a technical services contract with
Maricultura de Bahia, which was owned by a large
construction company. Interestingly, the farm
was built in pure, coarse-grain beach sand.
Conventional wisdom dictates that you should not
build ponds in sand, but we successfully built
this farm on coarse beach sand without using
plastic liners, and learned a lot in the
process. Another interesting feature of this
farm was that it had a seawater and freshwater
source. Harvey engineered a structure that
allowed us to mix the two sources of water so
that we could control the salinity of the ponds
down to 1–2 parts per thousand. The farm
expanded to 600 hectares and at the time was the
largest shrimp farm in Brazil. It had
broodstock production facilities, the biggest
hatchery in the country, nursery ponds and a
processing plant, all located within the farm,
and for a number of years it was the technology
leader in Brazil.
Shrimp News:
How did you seal the ponds?
Henry Clifford:
We didn’t. They sealed
themselves. During the first cycle, we were
losing 10 to 12 percent of our water per day,
especially in the smaller (nursery/broodstock)
ponds, but due to the constant detrital rain of
bacteria, algae, feces, feed and other matter on
the pond bottom, the interstitial pores between
the grains of sand gradually became obstructed
by organic matter, and the ponds eventually
sealed themselves. By the second cycle, we were
only losing 5 percent or less a day. If you
want to exchange 10-15 percent per day of water
in the ponds, you don’t really care if 5 percent
of that water loss is downward through the pond
bottom. After a few production cycles, water
loss through seepage in our 10-hectare growout
ponds was minimal. We didn’t line any of the
ponds or canals with plastic, but fortunately,
we had a clay quarry nearby, which allowed us
the luxury of reinforcing sections of the
elevated supply canal with clay, since it had
the highest hydraulic pressure of all the water
transport channels. Despite our successes,
there are still compelling reasons not to build
ponds in sandy soils.
One of the biggest challenges is
to avoid “piping”, which usually occurs along
the point of contact between a solid structure
(for example, a concrete inlet or outlet
structure) and the earthen dike. Until we took
the necessary engineering precautions, we did
have problems with water seeping through the
dikes around the structures, and in some cases
resulting in catastrophic failure of a
structure. Also, ponds built in sandy soils
tend to have problems with water seeping from
full ponds into adjacent empty ponds, making
pond bottom drying and preparation very
problematic.
Shrimp News:
Is Maricultura da Bahia still
operational?
Henry Clifford:
Yes. It’s now part of the
Valença Maricultura conglomerate, located just
west of Salvador, in Bahia, Brazil. It’s been a
while since I was there, but I think the company
has around 1,000 hectares of ponds and two
hatcheries.
When we started, there were no
other shrimp farms in the area. Soon
thereafter, however, Brazilian investors copied
the lead of our client, and built several new
shrimp farms all around us.
As our contract in Brazil was
coming to an end, we signed several new
technical services contracts in Colombia. By
1988, we had eight farm management contracts in
Colombia: five on the Atlantic coast near
Cartagena and three in Tumaco on the Pacific
coast near the border with Ecuador. We designed
several new farms from the ground up, including
Cartagenera de Acuacultura and Agrosoledad, two
of Colombia’s better known projects on the
Atlantic Coast. Prior to our arrival, the
existing farms on both the Atlantic and Pacific
coasts were struggling with poor production and
a lack of technical organization. TMT
implemented semi-intensive production methods
and broodstock domestication programs on most of
our clients’ farms, using shrimp species
(stylirostris
and
vannamei)
that were not native to Colombia’s Atlantic
coast. We brought the founding stocks for our
domestication program from Panama and Ecuador
and never used any wild stocks from Colombia.
In fact, the Super Shrimp strain of
stylirostris
was inaugurated
at one of our Colombian projects. In Colombia,
we usually stocked 80 percent vannamei
and 20
percent stylirostris.
Survival of the stylies was low because early on
they had not yet acquired resistance to the IHHN
virus, but they grew much faster than the
vannamei.
Shrimp News:
Were the projects in Colombia
successful?
Henry Clifford:
For the most part, yes. Some of
the projects that we developed were extremely
successful. We took over a couple of farms that
were struggling and managed to increase their
production by 100 to 200 percent. The farms in
the Cartagena area were very successful, made
money and produced record yields for Colombian
farms at that time. Our projects in Tumaco were
also successful, compared to the other farms
around Tumaco, but for reasons intrinsic to the
Pacific coast, our pond yields in Tumaco never
approached the production levels achieved on the
Atlantic coast, where the conditions for shrimp
farming are much better. We also designed and
managed a hatchery for Cartagenera de
Acuacultura.
Shrimp News:
When did TMT do its first work in
Venezuela?
Henry Clifford:
Around 1990 we signed a contract
with Aquamarina de la Costa in Venezuela. I
stayed in Colombia to manage the contracts
there, while Harvey went on to Venezuela and
designed a farm and hatchery for Aquamarina. We
took some of our domesticated animals from
Colombia and moved them to Venezuela, initiating
what soon became a very successful domestication
program. Aquamarina is now the biggest
operation in Venezuela, and is very successful.
In 1991, I sold my shares in TMT
to Harvey and shortly thereafter founded another
technical services company, C&C Aquaculture
Services, with Harry Cook, who had helped TMT
with some of our projects in Colombia.
Harry has been working with
shrimp longer than anyone else in the business.
He began in 1959 with the National Marine
Fisheries Service, identifying the larval stages
of marine shrimp. After that, he developed a
new hatchery methodology at the Galveston Marine
Laboratory and later worked for Dow Chemical’s
shrimp farming project.
C&C had several contracts in
Venezuela—as technical advisor to existing farms
that were having problems. We managed to
increase production at those farms by 100 to 300
percent. One of the farms, Siembras Marinas,
near Barcelona, had experienced a dramatic drop
in production and had no idea why. As it turned
out, it had two problems. Its ponds were
infested with Callianassid (ghost) shrimp, which
destroyed the water quality and caused survivals
to drop by 50 to 60 percent. Fortunately, I was
able to help them control the ghost shrimp
populations. The same farm also had a disease
problem, which had remained undiagnosed until I
submitted some shrimp samples to Dr. Donald
Lightner at the University of Arizona, and Don
confirmed the first case of NHP (necrotizing
hepatopancreatitis) in Venezuela. Fortunately,
once detected, it was a disease that could be
easily managed using medicated feed. We fixed
the problems and the farm went on to be quite
successful. In addition to the two farms in
Venezuela, C&C also acted as technical advisor
to a large integrated project in Brazil called
Atlantis Aquacultura. Also, we were technical
advisors to CAMPA, Nicaragua’s largest shrimp
farming company, which was a project that Harry
had initiated prior to joining C&C Aquaculture
Services.
Shrimp News:
Let’s get back to Harry Cook for
a moment. He really got started early. What
was he doing with shrimp in 1959?
Henry Clifford:
He was working
at the Galveston Laboratory of the National
Marine Fisheries Service, studying the larval
cycle of penaeid shrimp. Harry was one of the
first people to report on the life cycle of
penaeid shrimp. He identified the different
species and made drawings of the different
larval stages, published the work and then went
on to do some of the very early research on
Lagenidium, a fungal disease that
affects larval shrimp.
Contrary to the current myth,
which gives Corny Mock credit for the
development of the Galveston hatchery
technology, it was Harry Cook and his team at
the National Marine Fisheries Service who did
much of the original work. Six months before he
left to go to work for Dow Chemical, Harry hired
Corny Mock and taught him the new Galveston
methodology for rearing larval shrimp. Harry
was about to give a paper on the technology at
one of the first meetings of the World
Aquaculture Society when he took the job with
Dow Chemical. Corny ended up giving the
presentation and somehow got credit for the
early work. Subsequent to that, Corny did make
a number of improvements to the technology, but
it was not Corny who did the original work. It
was Harry Cook. Harry has also developed a
proprietary software program for managing shrimp
farms.
Shrimp News:
When did you go to work for
Maritech, Mark Rosenblum’s shrimp farming
operation in Mexico that’s now part of the Super
Shrimp Group?
Henry Clifford:
In 1994,
Maritech hired me to help with strategic
planning and problem solving. Mark had had a
couple of sub-par production cycles because he
was stocking the Hawaiian strain of SPF
vannamei, and they weren’t doing well
against Taura. I suggested that he try
stylirostris,
specifically
the domesticated strain that we had initiated in
Colombia and Venezuela because it was resistant
to IHHNV and TSV. He mulled over the idea for
about a year. At the 1996 meeting of the World
Aquaculture Society in Bangkok, Thailand, I
introduced him to German Dao, who had our strain
of stylirostris
at his hatchery in Venezuela. Mark and German
got together and formed Super Shrimp. When the
company was fully incorporated, Mark asked me to
come on board as technical director. In 1997, a
year later, when all my contracts with C&C had
expired, I joined Super Shrimp full-time. Harry
also went to work for Super Shrimp, and we put
C&C on the back burner.
Back then, Super Shrimp was a
small Mexican company. In an 18 month period,
Mark grew the company from practically nothing
to the world’s largest producer of disease-free,
SPR postlarvae. We were producing as much as
500 million PLs a month from three hatcheries,
two in Mazatlan and one in northern Mexico, all
with our domesticated strain of stylirostris.
At the time we had some very experienced
hatchery managers—Josh Wilkenfeld, David Pavel
and Alfredo Medina—running our hatcheries.
Super Shrimp industrialized the
hatchery business in Mexico by convincing the
farmers that lab-reared larvae could produce
superior results over wild PLs. We were the
first company to produce exclusively
domesticated shrimp. We converted Mexico—at
that time the second largest shrimp producing
nation in the Americas—from an industry 100
percent dependent on vannamei
to an industry
in which stylirostris
was the dominant culture species. We were the
first supplier to deliver PLs directly to the
farmer as part of our obligation. Prior to our
arrival, farmers had to go to the hatcheries and
take delivery of PLs at their own risk. We
transported the larvae in 18–20 ton converted
milk tanker trucks. We had customers that were
located a thousand kilometers away from the
hatchery. We could ship them six to seven
million PLs at a time, chilled, in perfect
condition. On some days we were shipping 15–20
million PLs to our client’s farms.
We were the first hatchery to
sell only PL-15s. Prior to our arrival in
Mexico, hatcheries typically sold PL-8s and
PL-12s. Contrary to previous practices, we were
the first PL supplier that did not offer credit
to Mexican shrimp farmers. We had a premium
product, a domesticated, genetically improved
SPR (specific pathogen resistant) shrimp, the
farms wanted it, and they paid up front for it.
We also insisted on our clients signing
long-term contracts, another first in Mexico.
We were the first hatchery to offer
comprehensive technical support to all clients
at no charge. With our larvae came a team of
experienced farm managers and technical advisors
as part of Super Shrimp’s Technical Services
Division. That was my department. Our
technical services advisors were mostly former
production managers at big farms. At one point
we had over a 100 clients, and we taught them
how to farm stylirostris.
We did not just sell them larvae, we also helped
them with their production problems. We were
the first hatchery company to offer free
pathology services to our customers from our
disease diagnosis lab managed by Dr. Ken
Hasson. We provided technical workshops on a
large scale. Sometimes two hundred people would
attend our workshops. We provided our customers
with a monthly technical newsletter and a
proprietary manual that I wrote on how to grow
stylirostris.
Shrimp News:
Are the hatcheries still
producing stylirostris?
Henry Clifford:
They produce
whatever species mix the farmers want. Right
now, the two hatcheries in Mazatlan produce
mostly vannamei. The hatchery in
northern Mexico produces stylirostris
almost
exclusively. We also produced small amounts of
SPF vannamei
at that hatchery for stocking the company’s
freshwater inland farm in Arizona.
Information:
Henry Clifford, Shrimp Improvement Systems,
Inc., 88005 Overseas Highway, No. 10-166,
Islamorada, Florida, 33036 USA (phone
619-840-4808, fax 305-852-0874, email
hcclifford@aol.com).
On Saturday, May 5, 2001, I
interviewed Larry Drazba, general manager of a
700-hectare, semi-intensive shrimp farm and
processing plant in Nicaragua.
Shrimp News:
Tell me a little about your
educational background and your first steps into
aquaculture and shrimp farming.
Larry Drazba:
In 1976, I graduated from Loyola
University in Los Angeles, California, USA, with
a major in biology, a minor in chemistry and an
eye on marine biology. My first job? A
research assistant at Tap Pryor’s System Culture
Corporation in Hawaii, where I grew algae for
oyster larvae. Greg Emberson, currently a
shrimp farming consultant, managed the oyster
farm. I was there for two years, from 1976 to
1978. In the spring of 1978, I decided to
return to the mainland and go back to school.
In the winter of 1978, I began working on a
master’s degree at the University of
California/Davis. At the time, Serge Doroshov,
Wally Clark, Fred Conte and Graham Gall were
involved with the aquaculture program at UC
Davis. It was an exciting time because sturgeon
farming was just getting started in California.
I did my master’s thesis under
Graham Gall, a geneticist, who was raising
mosquito fish to control mosquitos in
California’s rice fields. We grew them in
stacked trays in a heated environment and seeded
them from planes. I was at Davis for about a
year-and-a-half and that’s where I met my wife
Monica.
I graduated in 1980, with a
master’s degree in International Agriculture
Development (although my thesis was in culturing
mosquito fish). Most of my course work was in
agriculture, economics, sociology and technology
transfer to third world countries. I was
determined to go overseas. A classmate at Davis
offered me a partnership with his family in a
prawn farm (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) in
Mexico. In June 1980, Monica and I gathered up
our limited possessions and moved to Mexico—and
we have been living out of the country for 21
years now.
At the time, not many people were
working with prawns in Mexico. Durwood Dugger,
currently a shrimp farming consultant, was doing
something in northeast Mexico; Miguel Avila
Tamayo was down in Colima; Jamie Dominguez was
in Acapulco; and there was one other group on
the Gulf Coast. At the time, marine shrimp
farming was reserved for cooperatives, so
freshwater prawn farming appeared to be a good
alternative for the private sector. We set up
shop in Barra de Navidad, Jalisco. I had
two projects, one in Tecomán, Colima, and one in
Chihuatlán, Jalisco. We were there for 3 1/2
years, from 1980 to mid-1983. It was the end of
the oil boom in Mexico and we experienced the
first devaluation in 1981. We were doomed, but
did not know it at that point. A lost decade
loomed in our future.
After a couple of years, we came
to the realization that prawns were just not
doing very well in Mexico. The animals did not
grow as fast as they did in other places. We
didn’t know why, but the productivity was not
good. We concluded that prawn farming was not
going to be a good business on the Pacific Coast
of Mexico. In 1983, we got out of that
business. The prawn hatchery worked; the
problem was growout. We just could not grow
enough animals fast enough to make a profit.
Then a gentleman from the Gulf
Coast of Mexico offered an opportunity to try
prawn farming in the state of Vera Cruz. So we
moved there in mid-to-late-1983 and started an
operation with a family out of Mexico City. We
had two small growout operations in Vera Cruz,
where conditions for prawn farming were supposed
to be much better than those on the Pacific
Coast. But the conditions were about the same,
and then we ran into an unforeseen problem. It
can get real cold on the Gulf Coast of Mexico
because there is nothing between Canada and
Mexico but barbed wire. Those winter cold
fronts that dip into the United States from
Canada frequently continue right down the Gulf
Coast to Mexico. It can get very cold in the
winter, prawns don’t like that, and they don’t
grow well. We ran the hatchery in the winter,
head-started the larvae in nurseries in the
spring, and hoped to get a good crop over the
summer and early fall, before the cold fronts
hit in late October.
We lived in a peso economy.
Prawn farming was still experimental and the
projects were very small, we had to make them
commercial or lose them because there was no
financial support. I did some consulting to
survive, worked for the Agricultural Development
arm of the Mexican National Bank and trained
bank officials in appraising aquaculture loans.
It was a lot of traveling from project to
project, I learned a lot about aquaculture and
project management as well as the Latin culture
and Spanish language, but economically we were
going no where and the projects folded.
For the first half of the 1980s,
one industry after another collapsed in Mexico.
Things kept getting worse and worse. Then, in
1985, just as things started to get better under
the De la Madrid Administration, a huge
earthquake crumpled Mexico City. Any money that
was available was sucked into Mexico City, not
for the rebuild, just for the clean up. It was
a real mess, devastating, and with that the
country slipped again. So in early 1986, we
decided that it was time to move on.
I mailed my resume to people who
might be interested in my talents. I received
the strongest response from Blair Smith at
Delarvas, S.A., in Ecuador, and took a job
working at his spawning station in Esmeraldas
for a short time.
My real experience in Ecuador
started after leaving Delarvas. For the next
five years, I worked with Robert Moss on two
projects: Megalarvas, S.A., a shrimp hatchery in
Manabi Province, and El Portillo, S.A., a shrimp
farm in Guayas Province. Although I had
experience with freshwater prawn, oyster and
fish hatcheries, this was my first work with
shrimp. Yasu Akamine was my mentor. We started
the hatchery first, right at the beginning of
the 1986-1987 El Niño. With wild seed cheap and
abundant, the hatchery struggled for two years.
In 1988, we started the shrimp farm to take
advantage of the boom in Ecuadorian shrimp
farming and to give the hatchery a market for
its seed. I had three years on that farm, the
first was very slow, coinciding with the La Niña
of 1988. The next two years were excellent.
By this time, Monica and I had
been out of the country for ten years. We were
very content living overseas, but for whatever
reason, I did not feel at home in Ecuador. I
was offered an opportunity to join Ed Scura on a
shrimp farming project in Guatemala, Fincas
Aquaticas, S.A., and accepted. I spent three
years in Guatemala working on this project (and
briefly for Pesca, S.A., a Guatemalan shrimp
farm run by Ladex Corp.). Fincas Aquaticas did
not do well commercially. The location was very
difficult, the water quality seasonal—and
production dropped dramatically during the dry
season.
At the time, Robins McIntosh was
running feed trials for Zeigler at the farm and
also working for Fincas Aquaticas on the cause
of the dry season problems. Conversations with
Robins about nutrition, water quality, and,
especially, the microbial community in shrimp
ponds, have had a great influence on my current
shrimp farming strategy.
In 1995, Andy Kuljis (currently
president of Aquatic Farms, a consulting
company) of Amorient called with the offer of a
job in México. By this time, the Guatemalan
project needed logistical management more than
biological expertise, and Monica was very
anxious to return to México. We bundled up the
four children and moved to Mazatlán, Sinaloa, to
work for AquaNova, S.A. It had been almost
seven years since leaving México and the country
was very different. We did not like living in
Mazatlán, a tourist town, because we were used
to living in rural areas with more native charm.
The AquaNova project was very
interesting. It gave me the opportunity to
participate in the start up of the SPR 43
(specific pathogen resistant) Penaeus
stylirostrus program in México. France
Aquaculture (a consulting company with links to
the French Government, but no longer in
business) sold AquaNova a complete technology
package for farming IHHN resistant
stylirostrus in Mexico. It was the first
time I had seen a packaged deal for shrimp
farming technology and thought it was a good
approach.
The production potential was
incredible at AquaNova because the stylies were
very fast growing and production technologies
developed by the French combined with the good
water quality in México yielded excellent
results, but it would be very difficult for
AquaNova to meet its ambitious development plan
under the existing political system in México.
I left before the commercial project really got
under way.
In late 1995, I receive a phone
call from Jeffrey Graham (Enaca/Ecuador) about a
shrimp farming opportunity in Nicaragua.
Jeffrey was involved in a project there and
needed a project manager. I took the job.
Shrimp News:
Before you get into your
experiences in Nicaragua, how about a brief
history of shrimp farming in Nicaragua?
Larry Drazba:
In Latin America, most shrimp farms are
well-capitalized large-scale operations. In
Nicaragua, however, government sponsored
cooperative farms are a major part of the
industry and, in fact, launched it with the
construction of the first ponds in the late
1980s. But important development of the
industry did not occur until 1993 when both
privately owned companies and more cooperatives
jumped into the business. There was tremendous
growth during 1994 and 1995 and farmed shrimp
became a major export item, approximately $15
million, for the first time.
With a couple of good years behind it, the
industry experienced another wave of investment
in 1995.
Unfortunately, the next four
years brought one catastrophe after another.
First Taura. Then Mitch. And then whitespot.
In 1998, we were recovering from
the Taura virus, the industry was optimistic,
farms were expanding—and then Hurricane Mitch
happened. The big private sector farms near the
mouth of the estuary were not hit as hard as the
cooperative farms in the upper part of the
estuary, where water levels rose three meters
and wiped out most of the farms and carried the
crop out to sea. With the local infrastructure
destroyed and costs rising, the private sector
struggled, but it recovered relatively quickly
after Mitch.
Those that responded the quickest
were Camarones del Pacifico (CAMPA, one of the
biggest farms), Sahlman Seafood de Nicaragua,
Nicaragua Camaronera, S.A. (which is Mario
Callejas, a long-term shrimp farmer from
Ecuador, who is Nicaraguan and back in the
country operating a 500-hectare farm), and our
company, Camanica, S.A. Since the private
sector farms came through Mitch in pretty good
shape, they were heavily stocked in January
1999—when whitespot hit. Pre-whitespot
survivals were 35%; post-whitespot, 5% to 10%.
It looked like the end of the world for shrimp
farming in Nicaragua.
Shrimp News:
How did your company survive all
of this?
Larry Drazba:
After Mitch but before whitespot,
we had a board meeting and looked at
everything. The banks restructured our
financing, but would not put up any working
capital. We needed to recapitalize. Our
original partners refused to come up with any
new money and abandoned the project. In March
1999, I was asked to close the operation, but
decided to keep it running to support our 150 to
160 permanent employees and up to 800 temporary
employees in the processing plant. I spent a
year looking for a white knight to come in and
help pick up the pieces.
During this time, I produced a
little seed and processed a little product. All
income was put back into the farm. Production
started to go up a little. We were basically
living hand to mouth for 15 months. A couple of
times we came close to selling the farm, but the
investors never came up with the money.
Then, in early 2000, when I
didn’t have enough money to stock the ponds, I
gave Jeffrey Graham, who was working for Eastern
Fish Company (the Bloom Family) in the United
States, a call. Jeffrey was working on
Eastern’s buyer diversification program, a
program designed to reduce Eastern’s dependency
on Ecuadorian farmed shrimp. I asked Jeffrey if
the Blooms would be interested in taking a
position in Nicaraguan shrimp farming. They
were! Two days later I had a check for
operating expenses. The farm was up and running
again! Without the Blooms, the company would
have failed. I am tremendously grateful for
their support.
In August 2000, we managed to
negotiate a deal with the bank to buy the
assets, so now all the assets are in a company
called Camarones de Nicaragua (Camanica, S.A.)—everything,
the hatchery, the processing plant and the
farms. The Blooms got involved in Nicaragua as
a carry over measure until another group came
along who were more production oriented. That
group has not appeared yet and in the meantime
together we have managed to get the operation
back to 100%.
Information:
LarryDrazba, Camanica, S.A., Km.
130 Carretera, Chinandega, León, Nicaragua
(phone 505-341-1628, fax 505-341-3744, ldrazba@ibw.com.ni).
Source:
Bob Rosenberry, Shrimp News
International. March 2005.