INDOOR SHRIMPING BIZ NO SMALL CHALLENGE If the alarm goes off, in some cases you’ve got less than 20 minutes to rectify it ... otherwise, you start losing shrimp.
Farm figures out how to produce sensitive crustacean at commercial scale PHOTOS: PETER J. THOMPSON
AYLMER, ONT In the middle of giving a tour, Sheldon Garfinkle peers into one of his company’s water tanks. Blue shrimp the size of fingers dart away from him, hiding in the far corners.
“They can hear us,” he said. “They are very sensitive creatures.”
Garfinkle’s great accomplishment is that these sensitive shrimp are alive at all, trotting around tanks stacked six levels high. For five years, the biggest problem in Canada’s fledgling, indoor shrimping business has been dead shrimp. If the water is too cold, they die. If the filtration isn’t right, they die.
For the few shrimp farmers operating in Canada, a 50-per-cent survival rate is an achievement. As a result, homegrown shrimp has been a rare delicacy, served infrequently by chefs and high-end fishmongers.
But at the Planet Shrimp facility in Aylmer, Garfinkle and his team say they have figured out how to produce shrimp at a commercial scale. Garfinkle, the company’s chief executive, conservatively puts the plant’s capacity at 300,000 pounds of shrimp a year — enough to start looking into international exports while fulfilling a growing list of supply agreements with luxury hotels, resorts and upscale Toronto chains such as Pusateri’s Fine Foods and Hooked seafood markets.
The shrimp also show up at dozens of restaurants across southern Ontario. Canadian farmed shrimp seems on the verge of a new phase, with Planet Shrimp and a rival in British Columbia both claiming they are making good on their ambitions to expand their reach far beyond a group of local chefs. “Shrimp’s the new cannabis,” one Planet Shrimp executive joked recently.
But with so few success stories and a high retail price tag, the shrimp’s path to the big time and grocery stores will be difficult. The main selling point for the Canadian product is what it is not. It’s not shipped in from thousands of kilometres away.
It’s not as ecologically harmful as wild-caught shrimp, which often involves dragging nets that inadvertently catch endangered species such as turtles, sharks and dolphins.
It’s also not the kind of cheap farmed shrimp from Asia, much of which is grown in outdoor pools created by destroying mangroves and treated with antibiotics to keep the shrimp alive, according to Ocean Wise marine biologist Alasdair Lindop.
But producing commercial quantities indoors means keeping millions and millions of shrimp. A lot can go wrong, even though the concept of such farming seems simple enough.
“I could do it in my backyard,” said Warren Douglas, project manager at Berezan Shrimp Co. in Langley, B.C., the only other fully operational shrimp farm in Canada. “You know, build a little shed and I could be growing shrimp probably within a few months.”
In a commercial context, however, “you’ve got basically a life support system keeping millions of animals alive,” he said. Both Berezan and Planet Shrimp monitor their facilities 24 hours a day, seven days a week, watching for issues in the tanks that could threaten the stock — for example, a burst pipe that lowers water levels. “In the middle of the night, if the alarm goes off, in some cases you’ve got less than 20 minutes to rectify it,” Douglas said, “otherwise, you start losing shrimp.”
The short history of shrimping in Canada starts with Paul Cocchio and his son Brad. They were hog farmers in Campbellford, Ont., two hours northeast of Toronto, who turned their hog barn into a shrimp barn five years ago. The shrimp barn is empty now. Cocchio was fed up. He was paying to heat the water to nearly 30 C through the winter and buy supplies from the U.S. on a weak Canadian dollar, only to pull up tattered shrimp corpses whenever he skimmed the bottom of his tanks.
“We haven’t figured out what’s gone wrong,” he said. Cocchio’s shrimp production peaked at 200 pounds a week sometime around 2017. The wineries in nearby Prince Edward County bought most of it. Then consultants and aquaculture experts started making suggestions, he said, about improving his water filtration and increasing his shrimp survival rate beyond 50 per cent. “Everything we tried made it worse,” he said.
“I don’t know — couldn’t figure out why. We’d had enough of it by then.” Cocchio said now, eight months after closing, he suspects murder. “We think it’s fighting at that point,” he said of the dead shrimp. The corpses he skimmed from the bottom of the tank were often “torn apart.”
But he has no way of knowing. The water is his tanks was too murky to see what was going on, since Cocchio’s system used algae as part of the filtration process. In the filtration room at Planet Shrimp in Aylmer, 10 million gallons of water pass through per day. The waste is dried and sold in “cakes” as fertilizer.
The heated water makes the room humid, almost feverish. The water and the shrimp in it are intensely monitored by sensors throughout the farm that collect a million data points per day. The shrimp grow in a row of shallow tanks, one row stacked on top of another, six rows high. Each row is as long as a football field, beginning with the nursery and ending in the Phase 5 tank. As the shrimp grow, they are transferred to progressively larger tanks, until Phase 5, when they are “harvested.”
In a lab beside the network of tanks, Planet Shrimp analysts monitor the shrimp’s progress in real time. After 137 days, the shrimp are siphoned out of the tank, through a turnstile, into a tube that shoots them to slaughter like mail through a mailroom.
The water in the tube is colder than in the tanks, which makes the shrimp docile in their final seconds. The shrimp slide out the tube onto a conveyor belt with little sprinklers over top — the “car wash,” as he calls it — that spray the shrimp with ice water cold enough to instantly kill them. About 74 per cent of them make it to this stage, which is above the level that Addison Lawrence, an 83-year-old professor at Texas A&M University and shrimp farming pioneer, said is needed for a commercially viable shrimp farm. “What they’re doing, it is the future,” Lawrence said.
From there, an X-ray machine grades them in half a second.
If a shrimp is jumbo, it ends up in the jumbo chute. The same process separates the medium shrimp and smaller shrimp. But the measly ones, or ones with puncture wounds or other defects, slide alone to the end of the conveyor belt, which drops them one storey into a reject bin.
Planet Shrimp gets its shrimp babies, or “post-larvae,” from a hatchery in Texas.
The babies are packed in a bag filled with ocean water, flown to Toronto and trucked to Aylmer where they’re inspected by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. They’re given time to acclimatize to Planet’s Shrimp’s water conditions, a third of the salinity levels of ocean water, before being released into the nursery tank.
Last week, a storm in Houston cancelled the shrimp babies’ flight, forcing Planet Shrimp to wait three days for a new batch to be delivered, since keeping the others in limbo that long would have put too much “stress on the animals,” Garfinkle said.
“That’s the reason to have a hatchery.”
Planet Shrimp has installed hatchery tanks at its facility to produce post-larvae, thereby simplifying the process.
The tanks are empty now, though Garfinkle said they’ll be operational soon, through a “strategic alliance” with his post-larvae supplier in Texas.