Posted on 04/19/2004 11:22:55 AM PDT by blanknoone
HAMILTON, N.J. - Here, on a 43-acre former dairy farm, John Culley has a vision of what the future of farming might look like in New Jersey.
Forget the Garden State. Think crustaceans.
In a venture that state agricultural officials say would be the first of its kind in the state, Culley, 31, plans to grow Pacific white shrimp in special indoor tanks and ship them live to specialty markets in Philadelphia and New York.
Talk about Jersey Fresh.
But Culley, son of a former New York City policeman, will tell you that this is no chimera or passing fad, but rather the product of long study and careful analysis.
"It will work," he said. "I've done my research."
Bob Rosenberry, editor and publisher of San Diego-based Shrimp News International, said that he had not seen Culley's plan but that high-density indoor shrimp farming was the industry's future in this country.
Still, he said, it is risky. No one has made money doing it yet.
Culley, a West Point graduate who left the Army as a captain in 1999, said he had started thinking seriously about shrimp farming while going for his MBA at New York University.
The seed came from two articles: one about industrial hog farming, the other about aquaculture. Later came a business plan for a "shrimp factory," which won him $20,000 in an entrepreneurial competition at NYU.
In dollars and cents, shrimp cannot be called small fry.
Americans eat tons of the crustaceans annually - about 1.2 billion pounds last year. Of that, all but 200 million pounds came frozen from overseas, one reason that seafood is the nation's No. 1 food import in dollar terms.
"Shrimp is the sweet spot of the market," Culley said.
But the farm he imagines is not like ones in Ecuador or Southeast Asia or even South Texas, where shrimp are raised in ponds covering thousands of acres of coastal land.
His would be miles from the ocean, in Mercer County, and based on the latest technology - efficient and environmentally sound.
"I realized shrimp farming was on a technological cusp, where several key technologies had matured in the last couple years to permit a fundamental change in the industry," said Culley, who also studied aquaculture at Texas A&M University.
"So instead of outdoor ponds in Ecuador, now I can do it high-density inside a building in New Jersey, and provide the major markets around here with a higher-quality product than frozen imports."
His intended market also is different from the ones served by the foreign farms. Culley wants to sell his first harvests to dealers in Philadelphia's and New York's Chinatowns, where there is demand for live fish. Next would be high-end restaurants that want the freshest possible shrimp. After that, who knows?
"There still is growth potential with shrimp," he said.
Culley plans to develop his farm in three phases, with the first to include a 25,000-square-foot building housing a series of tanks to take the shrimp from egg to market in about 23 weeks.
Initial production would be about 300 pounds a week, with the intention of boosting it to 6,000 pounds a week after construction of two other buildings.
"I can time my harvest to market needs," said Culley, who believes that American business know-how and a high-quality product can compete with the cheap land and cheap labor that make imported farmed shrimp so inexpensive.
His shrimp, he said, also would be raised in a "biosecure" environment, which means they would be protected and far less likely to contract the diseases that can ravage outdoor ponds.
For this and other reasons, Culley believes some consumers would be willing to pay more for his product than for imported frozen shrimp.
Culley's operation would join about 30 fish farms in the state, none of them so far raising shrimp. Most of the farms are geared to seeding shellfish beds, while the rest are a mix that grow fish for food, ornamentation or stocking streams.
The would-be seafood entrepreneur bought his property, on Route 524, at auction for $215,500 from the state farmland-preservation program after determining that the state had approved fish farming for agricultural land since 2001.
Culley would not discuss financing for his project, except to say he was not receiving government aid.
He is hoping to put in his first crop in time to harvest it for the Chinese New Year, which will begin Feb. 9 in 2005.
In the meantime, before his building goes up, Culley is trying to allay the fears of some neighbors that the shrimp farm will stink.
That's simply not the case, he said.
"The system is designed to be completely recycling," Culley said. "The waste is left in the system and reprocessed."
Rosenberry, whose Shrimp News International reports on shrimp farming around the world, said smell was not a complaint leveled against well-run operations. "I can't imagine what would smell," he said.
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