|
OceanBoy
diversifies with bait shrimp
Clewiston farm soon to be shrimp source
By Dick Hogan
The News-Press
Originally posted on September
17, 2007
In
a few months the shrimp on the hook at the
end of your line may be seeing the
outside environment for the first time
in its short life.
OceanBoy Farms, a high-tech
aquaculture operation outside Clewiston,
will start selling
live bait shrimp to distributors in about
two months when its first crop gets big enough
to tempt a fish, said Tom Hayes, chief financial
officer of OceanBoy.
“ They’re not big enough yet,
but almost,” he said, adding that OceanBoy
is already selling packages of frozen shrimp
to bait stores.
Unlike the Pacific white shrimp
that make up most of OceanBoy’s production, Hayes
said, “The live ones are definitely
a local variety because we would not have
even for a moment thought to insert a non-indigenous
species into the wild.”
Customers are
expected to be mainly distributors, he said,
although a few nearby bait stores
may buy direct.
Dave Westra, owner of Lehr’s Economy
Tackle in North Fort Myers, said he wouldn’t
be surprised to see OceanBoy’s business
model take over the business.
“ I can see it happening because the
pressure on the bait industry right now is
severe,” said Westra, who currently
sells frozen shrimp but not live.
He expects
the business eventually to be similar to
the live European night crawler
worms he sells: they originate in Belgium,
are shipped here and then raised to maturity
by local growers.
Some say farm-raised live
shrimp would be doing the environment a favor.
Mike Rehr,
who works as a fishing guide on Sanibel and
in Key West, said he thinks
the bait trawlers cause environmental havoc
by tearing up seagrass and by killing small
fish caught up in the nets.
But Behzad Mahmoudi,
a research scientist with the Florida Fish
and Wildlife Conservation
Commission Florida Marine Research Institute
in St. Petersburg, doesn’t see it that
way.
“ I think this is a pretty small-scale
fishery and I don’t think there is
an environmental issue with that.”
|
