Shem Creek - A seafood-lover's paradise!

Dr. Maurice Kemp hopes to start a whole new shrimp farming industry, and has purchased worldwide rights for the shrimp farming technology to do so.

As President of Royal Caridea, LLC, they are setting up bio-secure, closed-system, super-intensive, shrimp farming facilities to produce fresh 30g shrimp.

Large fresh shrimp are always in high demand at upscale restaurants everywhere you go, but right now, there’s no market for live shrimp, or any other seafood, since transportation costs are too high. Dr. Kemp says that if indoor shrimp farms were built close to major metropolitan areas, it’d drastically reduce the distribution costs, and Royal Caridea would have a good shot at supplying a whole new market.

Like any distribution business, it’s economies of scale; if Royal Caridea, or anybody else, can deliver live shrimp on a consistent basis at a reasonable cost, markets would grow quickly and significantly.

Maurice Kemp’s Summary

Background is multidisciplinary, with much of career directed towards preventing microbial induced disease and/or development of pharmaceuticals to alleviate clinical symptoms or signs associated with a disease state. Most recently, he has worked on the development of methods to detect pathogens and development of chemical methods to eliminate food & airborne pathogens. He also developed methods to inhibit mold & fungi associated with building products and participated in the interdisciplinary development of pharmaceutics for veterinary & medical applications.

Royal Caridea, LLC (currently under construction)

Fortunately for South Carolina, it doesn’t look like we’re gonna be environmentally impacted by BP’s oil spill. A bigger concern for many in the seafood industry here isn’t even about a drop in seafood supply, but rather, a drop in demand.

A recent poll by Louisiana State University of Gulf area residents found 57% of them said they were less likely to buy local seafood because of the spill.
– Seafood.com

True, you may be worried about seafood like Gulf residents are right now, but know this:

• of the 17% of the seafood Americans eat that comes from domestic sources, only 2% of that comes from the Gulf, according to the National Fisheries Institute, a trade group.

If everybody were aware of those numbers, the seafood market would largely remain stable throughout this environmental crisis. It still doesn’t solve the problem shrimpers are having with a huge reduction in supply out in the ocean though, but for shrimpers willing and able to make an occupational shift of sorts, shrimp farming may be an option worth looking into.

I had no idea how widespread shrimp farming is around the world until I just watched this video from Texas (A&M I think). I touches on all the different steps needed to get a shrimp farm going, but I’ll tell you right now, you’re probably gonna need some serious financial backing to get this project going.

According to Wikipedia, the U.S. hit a high of 5,000 tonnes of farmed shrimp production per year back in 2003 and 2004, but we’ve since slid back to 2,000 tonnes of farmed shrimp production (as of 2007); who knows, maybe you can get a piece of the market now.

Anyway, this diagram from SCDNR shows all the stages shrimp go through in their life cycle, something you’ll be intimately involved in if you work on a shrimp farm. Happy harvesting!