In order to minimize risk and increase the harvests of shrimp aquaculture, the industry must begin adopting more controlled farming methods, according to Robins McIntosh of CP Foods.
The current state of the shrimp industry, McIntosh said, hasn’t recovered from earlier disease challenges that have kept overall survivability rates down. The survival rate in 2010, he pointed out, was around 88 percent, but after EMS severely impacted the industry the survivability of shrimp hasn’t recovered.
That lower survivability has increased the risk associated with farming shrimp, leading to increased uncertainty on yields.
“The variance now is 38 percent. There’s not a lot of confidence in what we’re going to get out,” he said. Pond failure rates, he pointed out, have been high, and while some farmers have found significant success, “the mean farmer is struggling.”
Shrimp aquaculture, according to McIntosh, could learn from the control methods of other protein production industries in order to reduce that large variance. Poultry, he pointed out, has a 95 percent survival rate.
“They start a chicken, they know they’re going to harvest something,” McIntosh said.
Shrimp, he said, could be run as efficiently as poultry, by utilizing what he called the “fifth generation” of shrimp aquaculture.
“We can convert a low total yield shrimp farm into a higher-yield shrimp farm,” McIntosh said.
To do that, CP Foods has created indoor facilities with tight controls on factors like water quality, feed regimens, and more to increase the survivability of the salmon and reduce the uncertainty of shrimp farming.
“In every part of the system, we’re putting in automation. We’re trying to take the tedious labor out of it,” McIntosh said.
The new systems that CP Foods have created greatly increases the amount of shrimp that can be grown and harvested per hectare, and survivability rates in CP Foods broodstock facilities has reached as high as 97 percent. Reducing the footprint of shrimp aquaculture, he said, will be essential to keeping up with demand for food as the global population increases.
McIntosh added that the company’s breeding programs for both vannamei and monodon shrimp breeds have allowed them to have increased shrimp yields with faster-growing shrimp, and that now that the genome of vannamei shrimp has been sequenced, further innovations could be coming.
“There’s a lot of potential with these animals,” he said.
Photo courtesy of Chris Chase/SeafoodSource
