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Arkansas
Shrimp-Inland Natural Seafoods prepares
for national role in shrimp production
A small aquaculture operation growing
Pacific white shrimp that formed six months ago
in the southeast Arkansas town of Wilmot - population
786, according to the 2000 U.S. Census - has
big plans, as it hope to move from new kid on
the block in the shrimp business to a national
leader in domestic shrimp production.
Inland Natural Seafoods harvested
its first shrimp crop in the past month, and
the results were better than expected, Jackson
Currie, one of the company's owners and manager
of the growing operation said on Tuesday. He
wouldn't say exactly how much shrimp
was produced on the 25 acres where the antibiotic
and hormone free shrimp are grown in freshwater
ponds.
"We made a respectable yield. We
were pleased with our yield," Currie said."We
have an environmentally and socially responsible
attitude and a first-class product. Our shrimp
are absolutely delicious."
The company plans to expand the
acreage for next year, possibly to as much as
50 acres, and eventually wants to move from being
a local and regional supplier of restaurants
and retail markets to a national player in the
domestic shrimp market, which Currie says shows
great growth potential since 88 percent of all
shrimp consumed in the United States is imported.
The company is marketing its product under the
"BraveNew Shrimp" brand name.
"We have some aspirations for the
company to grow and be more than local and to
be more than regional. We would like that and
we're trying to be very careful about how we
pursue that growth," Currie said. "It's a $3
billion to $4 billion industry. The fourth-largest
trade deficit the United States has is in seafood,
and a significant portion of that is made up
of shrimp, so there are some opportunities there."
"Brave New Shrimp" is named after
a restaurant owned by one of the company's partners,
Peter Brave, who owns the Brave New Restaurant
in Little Rock, Arkansas. Brave, who also serves
as Inland's vice president of marketing said
the initial step now that the harvest is completed
and exceeded expectations is to find some new
regional markets for the product.
Along with Little Rock, the company
is eyeing Memphis and Nashville in Tennessee
as the first places it plans to sell its shrimp,
once distribution and pricing issues are resolved,
Brave said. The shrimp are being stored in a
warehouse in northern Mississippi.
"We've got a five-year plan,and
hopefuly after five years of harvesting, we'll
get to producing about 700,000 pounds of shrimp.
At that point we would start thinking about going
outside theregional approach," Brave said. "But
this year really bolstered our optimism, so we
might have an opportunity to expand faster than
that, depending on how things go in the next
year or two."
The shrimp is grown naturally,
with no antibiotics and no growth hormones or
preservatives on the shrimp themselves, Currie
said. With many Americans eating healthier and
consuming so much shrimp - it's the top seafood
consumed in the United States - the company is
touting its healthy benefits. Inland also is
considering seeking some form of organic certification.
Currie, who also operates Small
Fry Fish Farm, which sells hybrid striped bass
fingerlines - says the company isblessedto get
good water from an underground aquifer, and it
reuses the water by pumping it out of the ponds
at harvest time into a reservoir, where indigenous
plants purify it before it is pumped back into
the ponds when production resumes.
"We do claim to be a healthy product,"
Currie said. "I can't say if we would qualify
for organic certification, but what I can say
is I don't know what we are doing that wouldn't
qualify."
Inland is also looking at expanding
into other species, Currie said, with flounder
or black sea bass under consideration. "We have
on our mind exploringsome possibilities," he
said. "Which one we pick, I have no idea."
from THE WAVE October 20,2004
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