Virginia shrimp project welcomes Hawaii broodstock

By Staff Reports
Martinsville Bulletin

Blue Ridge Aquaculture should know soon if its high density shrimp farming experiment will pay off.
“ We’ll know in about six months how successful it will be” or nine months at the latest, said Bill Martin, company president.
If it turns out the way the company hopes, he said, the experiment will revolutionize shrimp farming and might have a “staggering” effect on the local economy, adding hundreds of jobs.
“ It will simply change the way the world grows shrimp,” Martin said.
Last week, cartons containing plastic bags of brood shrimp were delivered via air freight to the company from the Oceanic Institute in Hawaii. They contained 120 shrimp, each about 8 to 9 inches long, that had been slightly sedated, Martin said.
The bags were placed in nine tanks at Blue Ridge Aquaculture slowly to acclimate the shrimp to the water, a process that took a couple of hours, Martin said.
“ They’re doing extremely well,” he said Monday. “They are eating well.”
Usually, brood shrimp are fed blood worms, squid and similar food, Martin said.
“ We’ve chosen not to do that. We don’t want to create problems” with food that comes from the ocean, he said. Instead, “we went straight to artificial food.”
That consists of a powder that is mixed into a substance the consistency of cake mix, which is formed into worm-like shapes and fed to the shrimp.
“ If all goes well, we should have our first group of eggs within 30 days,” Martin said.
The 120 brood shrimp will produce tens of thousands of eggs, he said, adding that about three months after the eggs are hatched, he expects to have shrimp in the 25 to 30 shrimp per pound range. In contrast, premium shrimp are 16 to 20 per pound, and ultra shrimp are 12 to 14 per pound.
Each shrimp tank contains three individual tanks for small, medium and large shrimp, Martin said. The shrimp will be moved to each tank as they grow, he added.
The process, Martin said, “is a giant experiment.”
The company is investing about $3 million in its 30,000-square-foot facility to test this shrimp farming method, Martin said. That building in the Martinsville Industrial Park has been under construction for about nine months and should be finished within 60 days, he said.
During the next year, the company will work with Virginia Tech researchers on the USDA-funded study of various aspects of the shrimp operation, including nutrition and efficiency of production.
The method the company will use includes feeding the shrimp waste products from another fish the company raises, tilapia, which Martin said seems suited to the shrimp.
The shrimp are commonly called Pacific white shrimp and will be raised in the low saline environment.
Martin said farm-raised shrimp taste just as good as ones caught in the ocean. The plan is to process them at the facility and sell them to restaurants, grocery stores and other places.
The goal of the process is to raise shrimp with a density per gallon of water many times what is currently possible, which is about one-tenth of a pound per gallon of water. Martin said the company would like to produce as much as half a pound per gallon.
The company’s indoor shrimp operation appears to be unique in the United States, Martin said.
If the test is successful, it will give the company a “footprint” by which to build several similar facilities, a planned 10 in all, to produce a hundred million pounds of shrimp.
And there is much more to the company’s strategy than shrimp. Blue Ridge Aquaculture also has pilot projects working with tilapia and cobia yields, two food fish the company produces. If those projects are successful, the company might plan expansions to increase production of these food fish to similar high levels.
All together, Martin said, the operation could employ as many as 1,500 people easily if everything goes as planned.
The company does not have sufficient land for the expansion at its current site and hopes to find a sufficient site in the Martinsville and Henry County area, Martin said.