Imagine a farm crop that can be harvested three times a year, produces no pollution, is in high demand, and could produce a 100-thousand dollar an acre cash flow. A University of Missouri agriculture professor is producing just such a crop.
It’s Pacific White Shrimp. Professor David Brune is raising them in a saltwater closed system that recycles water and reprocesses waste so it’s another product. “People eat shrimp all the time,” he says “It’s right up there with lobster as something they want to go eat.”
He says Americans consume 1.4 billion pounds of shrimp a year, 1.2-billion pounds of it raised on industrial farms in China, Indonesia and Thailand. But Brune says that contamination-producing system will have to go away. And when it does, the sustainable , environmentally-friendly system he’s perfecting in a one-twentieth acre pond in Columbia will be the answer.
Brune knows how to grow shrimp with various levels of economic investment and risk. He says he has a file cabinet full of names of people who want to get in the business. Next, he says, is developing a marketing strategy.
