How Canada’s fledgling land shrimp industry is working toward becoming the ‘new cannabis’

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.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.

Canadian farmed shrimp seems on the verge of a new phase, with Planet Shrimp and a competitor in British Columbia both claiming that 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.

In a commercial context, however, “you’ve got basically a life support system keeping millions of animals alive,” he said. 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.Cocchio’s shrimp production peaked at 200 pounds a week sometime around 2017. The wineries in nearby Prince Edward County bought most of it.

“You look at water and you say, ‘Oh, there’s water,’” he said. “But when you start really looking at water, it’s amazing what science is behind it.” 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.”

A supervisor watches the shrimp as they enter the X-ray machine. He grabs one that is larger than the others, at least 40 grams, which he brings over to show Garfinkle. 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.

“Nobody here has ever witnessed the actual mating,” LeBreton said. “Maybe they’re shy. I don’t know. I have to assume it’s pretty damn quick, because we’re obviously watching.” There’s more to figure out, though: such as how to convince Canadians en masse to spend more for a pound of shrimp. Farmed varieties from overseas can cost less than $10 while Planet Shrimp’s products retail between $30 and $42 per pound, a premium price for a premium product, Budd said.

Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)

$30/lb? What were you thinking?

You can smoke shrimp? 😃

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