I visited a traditional shrimp farm while I was in Sonora. To get there, we drove away from the coast through a desert landscape with no paved roads, just wide tracts of tread-marked sand.
When we arrived the shrimp farm was barren desert. The shallow ponds where they raise the shrimp were sandy patches with cows grazing the small amount of green scrub. The farm had been damaged during Hurricane Jimena, which hit the Sonoran coast in early September.
However, the company, owned by the Luebbert family, is working on getting the 45-hectare farm back on line. I found the farm's manager, Ricardo Loreto, working on the pumps that fill and circulate the ponds with ocean water.
Loreto says the shrimp farms are struggling because of the low price for shrimp and the high cost of feed. Feed, he says, constitutes as much as 70% of the farm's expenditures. A ton of feed costs $850 and the shrimp need about 350 tons per cycle, which can last 90 to 110 days. Each cycle, the farm yields about 180 tons of shrimp. By my math, that means it takes roughly two tons of feed for every ton of shrimp produced. However, Loreto says the farm needs 1.5 kilos of food for every kilo of shrimp. (This interview was being translated and I wasn't aware of a discrepancy until I got my hands on a more thorough translation.)
I ask Loreto what he thinks of Pesquera Delly's attempts to farm shrimps in offshore cages. "I think it's a very good idea," he says, citing the open ocean water as a healthier environment for the shrimp and a suspicion that the infrastructure costs may be less than a land-based farm, which requires large amounts of electricity and diesel fuel.
Loreto has watched the shrimp fishermen struggle year after year. "I think aquaculture is the option for the future," he says.
* Originally posted to The New Aquaculture on Saturday November 14, 2009.
