Alongside East State Road 18, a two-lane rural byway that cuts through Fowler, Ind., agricultural machines rove over barren fields, stirring up dirt clouds as they prepare the land for growing season.
The drive is a looping sequence of grain silos, wind turbines and barns on a flat, far-reaching horizon. But at Karlanea and Darryl Brown’s farm, a sign breaks through the repetition, advertising “Fresh Farm Raised Shrimp.”
“I’m surprised there hasn’t been an accident out there,” Karlanea Brown said. “People literally slam on their brakes, back up their cars and come in to see what we’re about. ‘Really? You raise shrimp here?’”
On a sunny May morning, in the front of their shop, Karlanea Brown, 56, bags a pound of live shrimp by the handful, packing them with ice and handing them to a customer. For nearly eight years, the Browns have raised Pacific white shrimp in tarped swimming pools fixed with tubing and PVC pipes for aeration, a homemade system that won them the 2015 Indiana Innovation Award presented by Indianapolis-based nonprofit Centric Inc.
The Midwest has long been considered America’s breadbasket, a bountiful agricultural hub cultivating corn, soybeans, wheat and oats. Rearing cows and hogs has been a family tradition for some farmers who support a market of fresh meat and dairy.
Great Lakes states like Illinois support a moderate market for supply of freshwater fish despite decades of overfishing and competition with invasive species. But be it shrimp or sea bass, the coasts have been the envy of the nation’s heartland when it comes to locally sourced seafood.
That could be coming to an end.
Scientists have been exploring the viability of raising saltwater species in landlocked states, an approach that might help the United States — a country that imports more than 80 percent of its seafood (fresh and saltwater) — scale back a $15.6 billion trade deficit for seafood, by far the largest deficit in the food sector and second only to crude oil among natural resources. Experts say it would also alleviate the pressures of overfishing at a time when species are being harvested at unsustainable rates and some habitats are increasingly being threatened by climate change.
The process of raising seafood, known as aquaculture, has become one of the fastest-growing food production industries in the world, and 2014 marked a significant milestone as it was the first time that more fish were farmed globally for human consumption than caught, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
“Half of the seafood we’re already eating is farmed,” said Julie Qiu, an oyster connoisseur and marketing director for Massachusetts-based Australis Aquaculture, which farms barramundi, an Asian sea bass, in United States and Vietnam. “If we’re absolutely meeting demand, we won’t have enough wild seafood to feed everyone in the world. To put it in perspective, we should be having two servings of seafood a week, according to health experts. If we were to achieve that by only relying on wild catch, we’d need four planet Earths to sustain that. Farm-raised seafood has to step in and take on some of that volume.”
The U.S. ranked as the second-largest consumer and the third-largest producer of wild-caught seafood in the most recent United Nations report on global fishing and aquaculture commerce. However, the U.S. was listed 13th in aquaculture production, one spot below North Korea.
Production is scant in the Midwest, which produces less than 1 percent of the farm-raised seafood consumed in the U.S. Some operations have struggled to shoulder hefty operational costs, such as synthetic salt to replicate ocean waters.
Researchers say the solution to that problem could be right under their feet. About 540 million years ago, much of modern-day United States was the site of an ancient sea. Illinois, then located near the equator, was brimming with marine species.
While much of the seawater evaporated, researchers say considerable amounts of brine from that period remain trapped underneath Illinois. If drawn to the surface, this saltwater may be able to once again sustain saltwater species, establishing a locally sourced market in the Midwest and helping would-be farmers to drastically reduce the upfront costs, according to a study published by Illinois Sustainable Technology Center.
While this saltwater is five to six times saltier than the ocean in some places, researchers believe that if it were diluted, it would be suitable to raise striped bass.
Saltwater from these aquifers is already brought to the surface regularly in oil and natural gas recovery, and some is generated from coal processing and other industrial activities. The cost of obtaining the water and possibly treating it for contaminants is unclear.
“It’s kind of strange,” Srirupa Ganguly, an engineer at the center, acknowledged. “Saltwater is not something someone would imagine in a landlocked state.”
There are about 70 freshwater aquaculture facilities licensed in Illinois, down from 101 in 2011, according to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. The vast majority raise native species commonly stocked in lakes and ponds, like largemouth bass, bluegill and channel catfish. Tilapia, a fast-growing freshwater fish native to Africa and the Middle East, has been a popular choice for indoor operations. Eight of the 11 aquaculture facilities in Cook County, which has the largest number of operations, cultivate tilapia.
It’s unclear how many saltwater aquaculture operations are in the state because the Illinois Department of Natural Resources doesn’t require permits for facilities that raise species that cannot survive in freshwater, such as lobster, saltwater shrimp and oysters. Over the years, the department has fielded calls from those expressing interest in raising lobster and barramundi, according to Nathan Grider, an aquaculture program specialist for the department.
“There is quite a bit of interest in aquaculture because of the concerns with ocean fisheries being depleted,” Grider said. “So, there are public and even corporate interests in aquaculture technologies and tackling the food shortage issues. With the overarching issue of sustainable fisheries, I could see more opportunities for expansion inland where the production is really only a drop in the bucket compared to the potential.”
To this point, many of the aquaculture companies remain near the coasts or the Gulf of Mexico, some nurturing fish in large, open-water pens in the oceans, cages near shore and tanks close to the water. The high cost and limited availability of coastal land, in addition to negative effects to habitat from waste, could push aquaculture inland, researchers say.
For now, RDM Aquaculture is a rare exception.
In the early 1990s, when pork prices bottomed out, Darryl Brown, a lifelong hog farmer, began experimenting with farming tilapia. After years of trial and error, the Browns decided to shift their focus to shrimp, pooling together $500,000 from their inheritances for a six-tank system.
The early going was rough. The couple, who import fingerling shrimp from a hatchery in Florida, had failures of their pump and filters systems, a weather-related power outage and other issues, causing them to lose their entire first two batches and 70 percent of their third.
That motivated them to design their own system using regenerative blowers to pump air from outside. They’ve mostly staved off the cost of replenishing water and salts because they implement a closed-loop system with virtually no discharge. The farm also performs daily tests on water, gauging temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity, alkalinity, nitrites, nitrates, ammonia, carbon dioxide and pH.
Today, RDM Aquaculture has expanded to 19 production tanks for shrimp, seven intermediate tanks, 10 nursery tanks, 25 crayfish tanks and a tilapia tank. The operation produces about 500 pounds of shrimp a month, some of which has been sold at Harvest Market in Champaign.
After nearly eight years in the shrimp business, RDM has helped set up 32 other shrimp farms across the country.
“I get asked all the time: Why are you helping set other farmers up?” Karlanea Brown said. “I’m not naive enough to think that I can produce all the shrimp in the U.S. I need help. With all the shrimp farmers coming up, a lot of people are worried about another shrimp farmer close by. They don’t understand, you can’t supply the whole market. I don’t care how large you are.”
About half of U.S. seafood imports are from aquaculture, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In announcing $9.3 million in research grants for projects around the country to develop the nation’s marine and coastal aquaculture industry in October, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross took aim at the disparity.
“This country, with its abundant coastline, should not have to import billions of pounds of seafood each year,” Ross said.
While the growing demand for seafood is undeniable, the aquaculture industry still faces many roadblocks, namely the stigma of farm-raised seafood.
Coastal shrimp farms have been blamed for destroying mangroves in several countries in Central and South America and using slave labor in Thailand. Some overseas operations have been known to use hormones for control of reproduction and growth, and antibiotics to treat diseases caused by excessive bacteria.
“People think farm-raised seafood is terrible. It’s actually not,” Karlanea Brown said, noting their shrimp are hormone- and antibiotic-free. “I always tell people when I get that comment, ‘You know what, I work darn hard to produce a clean product, because that’s my livelihood. I’m going to work harder than the guy who’s pulling it off the boat.’”
In recent years, seafood consumers have become more sensitive about what’s in their food and where it comes from, according to Sean Dimin, co-founder and CEO of Sea to Table, a supplier of traceable and sustainably caught seafood. Growing consumer knowledge has been driving change for seafood in the same way it brought about antibiotic-free chicken or grass-fed beef, Dimin said.
The company, which does business with Chicago-based restaurants including Frontera Grill and Girl & the Goat, touts a menu of exclusively wild-caught, domestic fishing operations. Dimin, whose appreciation for seafood grew from his time fishing, said he remains skeptical of the farm-raised products and the overall viability of aquaculture.
“You can trace the roots of aquaculture back to the ancient Romans who were farming oysters,” Dimin said. “But it hadn’t really been done at scale until the 1970s. Unfortunately, then, it was built for volume through an agri-industrial model, and there wasn’t enough regard for the environment. There are small companies, even some in the U.S., who are farming fish the right way — and that’s fantastic. But very few are doing it at scale.”
Some in the industry note that aquaculture has been a lifeline for wild fish, and that the two industries are now intertwined.
Between 80 to 90 percent of salmon caught in the Pacific Northwest started their lives in hatcheries, according to NOAA. Even with efforts to rebuild, wild stocks haven’t been reliable, said Matt Mixter, owner of seafood shop Wixter Market in Wicker Park
“It makes no sense to promote one or the other,” Mixter said. “One wouldn’t exist without the other. Both will be there in the future and, if we only relied on one, no one would be able to afford to eat seafood except the top 1 percent. (Fishermen) should all support aquaculture because it relieves the pressure on wild stock.”
In addition to overfishing, scientists are concerned about the growing amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which they suggest is leading to warming waterways and changing pH, which can be disruptive for some species.
Seafood retailers, Mixter included, have had to closely monitor some species to make sure their products are being harvested at sustainable rates. Mixter said he’s traveled extensively scouting the products — farm-raised and wild caught — that he sells: mahi mahi from Ecuador, yellowtail from Hawaii, barramundi from Vietnam, Scottish salmon.
The primary benefit of having saltwater aquaculture facilities in the Midwest would be lower transportation costs and a lower carbon footprint. For now, the main deterrent for many businesses has been pricing, Mixter said.
A pound of shrimp from Southeast Asia could be priced at $6, whereas some shrimp operations would need to sell at about $13 a pound to break even, according to studies by Kwamena Quagrainie, an aquaculture marketing expert at Purdue University who has studied consumers’ interest in farm-raised seafood in the Midwest.
The tides have begun turning in the past decade, and now consumers are willing to pay more for locally sourced food, Quagrainie said.
“With the local food movement, the perception has changed,” Quagrainie said. “Local is the new term for organic; it’s the trendy thing around food.”
Despite the odds, RDM has pressed forward, most recently with a goal to start a shrimp and oyster hatchery in their attempt to become a one-stop seafood shop in the midst of corn and soy country.
“I’ve been told by so many people, ‘It can’t be done,’” Brown said. “I say, ‘Y’all told us we couldn’t raise shrimp, either.’ But here we are, 7½ years later and we’re still running.”
