You’re an upper Tennessee tobacco farmer. You don‘t grow but a few acres, and the IRS would never mistake you for Bill Gates, but you make enough on top of your regular job or farming with leaf to give the family presents at Christmas and to finance their weekly jaunts to the movies or to Blockbuster.
Still, there’s all this indecision about bills in Congress that would allow the buyout of tobacco quotas, and you have no clue when they’ll be passed, or if they will at all. Add to this worry having to feed the family and pay for cable for the kids, and your wife is frowning over the family budget for the third time this week already, asking if you’re going to plant again next year, or what? -- and your best answer is a scratch of the head and, “I don’t know.”
“You want to try shrimping?” she suggests.
“We moving?” you ask, puzzled, because you would be the last in the family to find out about a relocation to the seaside. After all, this is Tennessee and your chances of raising shrimp for profit are roughly the same as the Bushes getting out of the petroleum business.
Don’t laugh too soon. You don’t need a boat and nets to harvest shrimp -- or, more properly, prawn -- in the Volunteer State. In fact, University of Tennessee fisheries specialist and professor Dr. Tom Hill is on the forefront of research into how to raise prawn in this landlocked area.
“I feel sort of like a pioneer, with a new crop,” Hill good-naturedly tells a large group of tobacco farmers at a recent field day at the UT Highland Rim Experiment Station in Springfield, Tenn. He senses their bemusement, but, more importantly, also their curiosity.
While it’s difficult to envision steadfast leaf growers knocking one another aside to dig ponds out on the lower forty to tend seafood, Hill fields several thoughtful questions from them. This is the second year the Highland Rim station has conducted such experiments, and only the third year farmers scattered across the state are raising roughly 200 total acres of prawn.
Here’s Hill‘s basic overview: Freshwater Giant Malaysian Prawn are originally from the Southeast Pacific region and it was not known how to breed them in captivity until a Chinese biologist hit upon the answer in the 1950s.
Prawn go through three stages. The hatchery stage is when they hatch and is the only time when they must live in salt water; it lasts 30 to 40 days. In the nursery stage, 45 to 50 days, they are transferred to fresh water to grow into juveniles. They are then moved to specially-designed, aerated ponds for the final growout stage of 120 days from June to October.
At this point, the bulk of what’s done in Tennessee is pond growout; to Hill’s knowledge, there’s only one nursery. The babies are generally hatched in Texas, at least for local … well, the best term for people who do this seems to be “prawn farmers.”
Or maybe it’s “ranchers.” When describing how voraciously prawn eat just about anything that’s put in front of them -- high-phosphate fertilizer, grain feed, catfish chow, dry dog food -- Hill advises anyone digging a prawn pond to throw in a few bales of hay a few weeks before stocking, to allow bacteria, worms and plankton to develop within them. “Don’t be surprised,” he adds, “if when you drain the pond to harvest the prawn, the hay’s gone. They’ll even eat that!”
On the back row, a farmer leans forward and whispers to an ag student, “Will they moo?”
Predictably, the discussion turns more serious when Hill gets to the part about profitability. Live prawn are highly valued by many diners, especially in scattered Asian-American communities, and if you market well enough you can draw people to your harvest just as well as any pick-your-own fruit orchard manager does. Current market price is around $5.5 per pound, and Hill estimates an enterprising grower could produce as much as 1,000 pounds of fresh prawn from a one-acre pond; under experimental conditions, as much as 1,800 pounds has been reported.
It’s oversimplifying the matter to say “only” this or that is needed, but basically, prawn need a shallow, narrow lake with steep sides to discourage wading birds, kept at an ideal temperature of 82 to 87 degrees Fahrenheit, and plenty of food. In addition to the hay/plankton snack and fertilizer, your daily feed expense would be anywhere from 15 to 35 pounds of grain-based food or pellets.
The return is that, done well, Tennessee (and Kentucky) prawn can grow slightly larger than their Mississippi brethren; while southern waters are warmer, the slight temperature difference closer to the Midwest assures prawn won’t mature quite as fast, and can channel all that reproductive energy into growing that extra little bit instead.
Best of all, there’s little preparation for sale. Prawn can be kept alive in a storage tank or flash-frozen and kept on ice for consumer selection. The drawback is that they must be sold quickly so they don’t spoil.
“So far, we just haven’t grown enough” to saturate the market and necessitate processing and freezing procedures in Tennessee, Hill says. Also, of opening local nurseries or hatcheries, “Once the industry gets large enough, we’ll have to have more people doing this.”
Right now, competition is low and the potential market is wide open for fresh seafood like this, he adds. It’s not for everyone, but those willing to make the investment of land, money, patience and marketing might be pleasantly surprised.
“How many acres can Tennessee assimilate?” Hill wonders aloud. “We don’t know, but we’re not there yet.”
-Originally published in Farm World , July 2002