Farming of a Different Sort

Her nickname, “Bubbasue,” suggests that Susan Harkins approaches life a bit differently than most women, but when she announced her plans to raise shrimp in a pond on her farm in Fayette County, Ky., many thought she had lost it.

“I started doing organic farming when everyone thought that was a fad. But they really laughed at me when I started shrimping,” Harkins says good-naturedly.

Harkins grew up in Michigan but spent summers on her grandparents’ farm outside of Lexington, Ky. “When my grandfather died, I came back to Kentucky and worked for the family, managed the farm, and ended up buying 50 acres of the original 1,500 that my grandparents owned,” Harkins explains.

Her small farm’s rich, fertile soil originally prompted Harkins to plant specialty produce—including edible flowers such as pansies and nasturtiums—that she sold to upscale restaurants. Then a chef told her about research being conducted on freshwater prawns (large shrimp) at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.

“So I went over there to the university, and they showed me these great big beautiful prawns with bright blue tails that they fed on sour mash (a byproduct of Kentucky’s bourbon industry). Well, that seemed like Kentucky to me,” Harkins says.

She approached James Tidwell at the KSU Aquaculture Research Center, convincing him that she should be his first field trial operator.

“He kept saying ‘no’ and I kept saying ‘yes’, and guess who won?” Harkins laughs about becoming the first shrimp farmer in the Bluegrass State.

She stocked her first pond, measuring a half acre, with about 12,000 tiny shrimp measuring 1/4 to 1/2 inches long. She developed and engineered the pond and set it up for farming, at a cost of about $7,500.

“That first year, I had a pitiful harvest, about 150 pounds of shrimp. Today, we push for 1,000 pounds of shrimp to the acre of pond and average a profit of $2,000 to $3,000 per acre. That’s about the same profit as for tobacco, and for about the same work,” she says.

Of course, shrimp have natural predators.

“Blue heron are not your friends. And my husband used to say he could tell that the shrimp were ready to harvest when he saw the frogs heading for the pond with a towel over each arm and a jar of cocktail sauce in one hand,” Harkins jokes.

Stephen Price, president of the Kentucky Aquaculture Association and himself a shrimp farmer, has for seven years raised prawns on his Bluegrass Shrimp and Fish Farm in Covington, Ky. Working with Tidwell and others, he’s helped improve feeding methods. “We still feed distillery byproducts when they are young, but now we change to high protein feed at the end of the growth cycle,” Price says.

Price says shrimp will cannibalize if crowded, so to increase the crop size, farmers use grading bars, which sort the growing shrimp by size. “Everybody grows better if there are no big bullies in the pond,” Price laughs.

Once the shrimp are ready to harvest in early autumn, Harkins and Price invite the public to a pond party where the shrimp sell for about $14 per pound. “Whole shrimp on ice will only last two to four days, so right now most sales are of fresh shrimp right off the pond bank,” Tidwell says. “We don’t know how to transport live shrimp real well yet, but we’re working on it.”

Meanwhile, such restaurants as the five-diamond Oak Room in Louisville’s posh Seelbach Hilton Hotel are glad to buy all the live Kentucky shrimp they can process.

“We buy several hundred pounds a year and freeze them for use later,” says Adam Seger, director of restaurants at the Seelbach.

High-end restaurants aren’t the only ones interested in furthering shrimp farming in Kentucky. The Kentucky General Assembly, in its 2000 session, made $1 million available for pond construction and another $2 million to be used for facilities.

“The industry has tremendous potential,” says John-Mark Hack, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Agricultural Policy. “If we play our cards right, we could turn Kentucky into a center of prawn production for the U.S.”

Niki Hendricks is a writer based in Louisville, Ky.

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