PCA Today - Fall 1994
New-Age Shrimping
Shrimp Farm Nets Agribusiness Opportunities for Gulf Coast Couple
Just over the horizon from Harold and Cheryl Bowers’ farm, shrimp boats cut a wake to and from their home port in Palacios Bay. While the shrimpers tend their daily catch and take care of chores, shrimp farmer Harold Bowers is also busy – checking water salinity levels in one of his ponds and preparing for yet another tour group.
The Bowers are on the cutting edge of a burgeoning aquaculture industry that’s bringing jobs and income to communities like Palacios. What began as a 25-acre sideline business in the 1980s, has gradually expanded to encompass 200 acres of ponds which this fall could yield more than one million pounds of shrimp.
As this year’s “Aquaculture Person of the Year” tells it, though, nothing in life ever works out exactly as you planned, and Bowers’ venture into aquaculture is no exception.
For 35 years, the Bowers family grew rice, cotton and milo along the Texas coast 75 miles southwest of Houston. In the early ‘70s, seeking a way to diversify, Harold decided to try catfish farming on a small scale. His first attempt into aquaculture was unsuccessful, but Harold continued to contemplate aquaculture as a way to diversity.
In 1987 he travelled to the Mississippi Delta to see firsthand the catfish operations there. He returned home, convinced that specialty catfish were the answer. “In the meantime, redfish caught our eye,” he recalls, and in 1989 he and wife Cheryl stocked three small ponds with redfish fingerlings and six ponds with shrimp. A hard freeze on Christmas Day 1989 killed all the redfish, ten months prior to their harvest date. The El Campo PCA members then turned their complete attention to producing a shrimp crop.
Perhaps good luck since then has had a little to do with the Bowers’ phenomenal success in shrimp farming, but El Campo PCA Senior Vice President David Strougaard know it’s more than that. “I’d have to rate his management skills at the top,” says Stougaard. “Harold runs an extremely good operations, and Cheryl is an integral part of the business handling all the day-to-day finances.”
Management, Bowers admits, is indeed the toughest part of the business. “Going into it, you have to know it’s not going to be an 8 to 5 job with every holiday off,” he says. “It’s a 24-hour-a-day job and your busiest time is in the summer.”
Between April and May, the Bowers stock their ponds with certified disease-free post-larvae stock, purchased from a hatchery in Harlingen. Then, until the fall, he and 14 employees check and fill feeding trays four times daily, and monitor oxygen and salinity levels in the water around the clock while the post-larvae mature to about 24 grams and count about 21 to the pound. “”Shrimp are delicate, so we worry about a cool spring and cool fall,” notes Bowers. If the water temperature falls below 22 degrees, the shrimp won’t grow.
At a rate of 30,000 pounds of feed per day, Bowers admits his $800,000 annual feed bill is his largest expense. Add to that a $45,000 monthly electricity bill during the growing season (“We could have bought the line by now,” he quips), and $300,000 in seed stock, and it’s no surprise that many would-be shrimp farmers are scared away. “Some say it takes too much money to get started, but you can get into it slowly,” says Bowers.
The Bowers spent much of this past summer expanding yet again, this time by adding a processing plant where they can weigh, process, package and store their own product. They hope to eventually sell individually quick frozen shrimp under the Bowers Shrimp label, straight from the plant. Besides ensuring additional quality controls and year-round marketing for their product, the plant will bring new jobs to the community.
At harvest, each pond is drained down the day before it is harvested. Because of the shrimp’s temperature sensitivity, during early harvest weeks, workers wait until late afternoon before harvesting each pond and then work until the early morning hours. By early October, daytime temperatures ahe dropped enough to allow harvest to begin each morning. Last season, the 35-member crews harvested five ponds a week, each with a catch of approximately 35,000 pounds of shrimp.
The next step, says Bowers, is what sets his farm-raised shrimp apart from traditional Gulf shrimp. “We chill kill about 800 pounds of shrimp at a time as soon as they are harvested,” he says. “This year, we’ll give them a second washing, then take them directly to the plant where they will either be sold fresh, or be frozen for sale later.”
Agreements with Texas Parks and Wildlife allow Bowers to pump water directly from Palacios Bay to fill his ponds. The water from the bay has a low salinity level and is richer in nutrients than the Gulf. In the event his ponds’ salinity levels start to rise, Harold can pump fresh water from an adjoining irrigation canal. For equipment, he improvises with catfish farming tools, since equipment specifically for the shrimp farming business still is virtually nonexistent in the U.S.
One of only five shrimp farmers in the state, and just a handful in the country, Bowers is a strong proponent of the aquaculture industry. “Presently 80 percent of the seafood consumed in this country is imported. In fact, imported seafood is the largest contributor to the U.S. trade deficit after petroleum,” he says.
“The industry has a tremendous future in this country. There’s nothing that creates jobs and impacts the environment less than aquaculture,” he says.
As much a PR man for the industry as a farmer himself, Boers is as likely to be found escorting a tour group around his farm as he would be feeding or monitoring the ponds. In recent months, Bowers Shrimp Farm has hosted groups from India and Egypt, as well as numerous vocational agriculture teachers and groups from Texas A&M. Cheryl can be found at promotional events lie Texas Agriculture Day in Bay City last June, where she treats visitors to her favorite recipes for farm-raised shrimp.
“It’s good for all of us to promote the industry,” he says. “There’s great potential for aquaculture. The wild shrimp catch is getting less all the time. We have the climate and availability of water, and once the industry catches on, it’ll become as large as the poultry business.”