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An Oral History of Shrimp Farming in the Western Hemisphere

 As Told By

Harry Cook: Harry got started in shrimp farming in 1959 and retired in 1999, a forty year career that took him all over the world as a shrimp farming consultant and shrimp farmer.  In the early 1960s, while working for the USA Bureau of Commercial Fisheries (which later became the National Marine Fisheries Service) in Galveston, Texas, he developed the famed “Galveston Method” of raising shrimp larvae. For the full report, click here.

Bill More: Bill is a shrimp farming consultant and vice president of the Aquaculture Certification Council, which certifies shrimp farms, hatcheries and processing plants.  He got started in shrimp farming in 1962 and spent twenty years in Panama developing one of the most successful shrimp farms in the Western Hemisphere. For the full report, click here.

Jim Heerin: Jim was the president and chairman of Sea Farms International, Inc., the management company for one of the largest (16,000 acres of ponds in Honduras) shrimp farming operations in the Western Hemisphere, for over thirty years.  He got started in shrimp farming in 1966.  Currently, he is Exective Director of the Aquaculture Certification Council, which certifies shrimp farms, hatcheries and processing plants.For the full report, click here.

David Drennan: David is manager of a shrimp hatchery in the Dominican Republic.  Previously, as a consultant, he worked for many of the most successful shrimp farming operations in Central America.  He owns many “firsts” in shrimp farming.  For example, he was the first person to spawn Penaeus vannamei!  He got started in shrimp farming in 1967. For the full report, click here.

Yosuke Hirono: Yoshi started his shrimp farming career at a University of Miami/Florida Power and Light shrimp farming project in 1967.  He built Ralston Purina’s first shrimp hatchery in Crystal River, Florida, USA, and had a long career as a shrimp farmer and shrimp farming consultant, mostly in Ecuador.  Currently, he is an aquaculture biologist at Aquatic Eco-Systems, a supplier of aquaculture equipment. For the full report, click here.

Dennis Zensen: Dennis Zensen was the man charged with building and recruiting personnel for Ralston Purina’s Crystal River, Florida, shrimp research facility in 1968.  Zensen’s management style led to many shrimp farming discoveries in maturation, breeding, larval rearing and growout.  The Crystal River facility and the personnel trained there went on to make a major contribution to the development of shrimp farming in the Western Hemisphere. For the full report, click here.

Ron Staha: Ron started his shrimp farming career with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Galveston, Texas, in 1970, culturing algae.  Later, with help from Yoshi Hirono, he designed the shrimp hatchery at Agromarina de Panama and then managed it for seven years.  Next he did shrimp hatchery consulting work throughout Latin America, and eventually he build his own shrimp hatchery in Panama. For the full report, click here.

Durwood Dugger: Durwood is a shrimp farming consultant and one of the pioneers of shrimp farming in the Western Hemisphere. He got his first job with shrimp in 1972 and has worked on more than 50 shrimp farming projects in the Western Hemisphere. For the full report, click here.

Russ Allen: Russ is a shrimp farming consultant and president of Seafood Systems, which designs and builds aquaculture facilities.  He started farming shrimp in 1976 in Ecuador.  He says in the early days in Ecuador, “War-like conditions existed between Empacadora Nacional and Empacadora Shayne—Hatfield and McCoy stuff—in boats, at night, just a few degrees south of the equator."  For the full report, click here.

Henry Clifford: Henry is vice president of marketing and sales at Aqua Bounty Technologies, Inc., a public biotechnology company focused on the development and marketing of health and therapeutic products for shrimp culture.  He got started in shrimp farming in 1979.  Later his consulting company, a partnership with Harvey Persyn, industrialized shrimp farming in Brazil and promoted the idea of domesticating shrimp broodstock in recirculating systems.  His company introduced P. vannamei to Brazil.  For the full report, click here.

Larry Drazba: Larry is manager of Camanica, S.A., a 700-hectare, semi-intensive shrimp farm and processing plant in  Nicaragua.  He got started in 1980, farming freshwater prawns (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) in Mexico, and over the last 25 years has experienced many of the harsh ups and downs associated with shrimp farming. For the full report, click here.

Roberto Chamorro: Roberto’s history in shrimp farming started in 1980, after completing university studies in Fisheries Engineering at the Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, Brazil, with a degree in aquaculture.  He currently manages a 1,200-hectare shrimp farm in Panama. For the full report, click here.

Bolivar Martinez: In 1991, “Boli” started fishing shrimp broodstock for Agromarina de Panama’s hatchery in Panama.  In 1993, he started Farallon Aquaculture, which today is one of the largest shrimp hatchery operations in Latin America. For the full report, click here.

Linda Thornton: In 1979, Linda started her shrimp farming career at the King James project, the first recirculating shrimp farm in the United States.  Then she went to Belize where she has worked on shrimp farms for the last 26 years.  Currently, she manages Aqua Mar, a 1,000-acre shrimp farm in Belize, and owns her own 100-acre extensive shrimp farm.  For the full report, click here.

A Brief History of World Shrimp Farming
Top of Page

Shrimp farming traces its origins to Southeast Asia where for centuries farmers raised incidental crops of wild shrimp in tidal fishponds.

Modern shrimp farming was born in the 1930s when Motosaku Fujinaga, a graduate of Tokyo University, succeeded in spawning the kuruma shrimp (Penaeus japonicus).  He cultured larvae through to market size in the laboratory and succeeded in mass producing them on a commercial scale.  For more than 40 years, he generously shared his findings and published papers on his work in 1935, 1941, 1942 and 1967.  Emperor Hirohito honored him with the title “Father of Inland Japonicus Farming”.

In 1954, after having achieved the title of Director of the Research Bureau of the Japanese Fisheries Agency, Fujinaga retired and, in 1963, he and some colleagues started a shrimp farm.  They used large, semi-intensive ponds on discarded salt beds and sandy beaches, instead of following Fujinaga’s original idea of super-intensive ponds.  In its May 1965 issue, National Geographic magazine reported: “Despite years of hard work, capped with brilliant technical success, Dr. Fujinaga has yet to make a profit from his operation.  But he...expects to turn the corner within two or three years.”  That was the experience of most shrimp farmers in the 1960s, and many sing the same song today.

Fujinaga also deserves the title “Father of Modern Shrimp Farming”.  In 1996, his sons, Ted and Kochi, worked as shrimp farming consultants in Southeast Asia.

In the early 1960s, a small shrimp farming industry sprang up around Japan’s Inland Sea and on the southern side of Kyushu Island, near the cities of Amakusa and Kagoshima.  In 1964, J. Kittaka developed a technique for rearing shrimp larvae in large outdoor tanks that simulated the natural environment.  In 1973, Mitsui Norin Marine Company, Ltd., pioneered the use of double-bottomed tanks, after a design by Kuni Shigueno.

World Shrimp Farming 1992 pegged Japan’s production of farmed shrimp at 3,000 metric tons (live weight), from 150 semi-intensive and intensive farms with 400 hectares of ponds.  In the Kagoshima area of Kyushu, farmers used large, round, land-based tanks and produced 15,000 to 20,000 kilograms per hectare.  Later, semi-intensive farms appeared on Japan’s southern islands—Okinawa, for example.

A cool climate, a rugged coast and high costs mitigate against shrimp farming in Japan.  But, since Japanese consumers pay amazingly high prices for fresh “live” kuruma shrimp (P. japonicus), Japanese shrimp farmers will find a way to service that market.  Recently, farmers in northern Australia began growing kuruma shrimp for the live market in Japan.

Although Japan never became a major shrimp farming nation, events were taking place in the United States that would thrust it to the forefront of shrimp farming technology.  In 1950, the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Commercial Fisheries (later to be named the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) established a lab in Galveston, Texas, to investigate the red tides that were killing large populations of commercially valuable marine life.  These investigations led to the development of techniques for culturing marine phytoplankton.  In 1958, when the lab began investigating larval shrimp rearing, it used marine phytoplankton to feed the larval stages of shrimp—and the famed “Galveston Hatchery Technology” was born.

As the pieces of shrimp farming technology dribbled out, consultants, large corporations, feed companies and investors carried them to Latin America, particularly Honduras, Panama, Brazil and Ecuador, where they teamed up with local entrepreneurs to build farms, hatcheries, feed mills and processing plants.  Worldwide, researchers and farmers tested dozens of penaeid species for their farming potential.  In the process, they worked out breeding and spawning techniques for most of the farmed species.  Other research concentrated on growout technology, nutrition and disease.  These early efforts laid the groundwork for an industry that expanded for two decades.