For more than 20 years, the government of North Carolina has been supporting aquaculture — commercial farming of aquatic creatures, from catfish to crawfish to tilapia. The University of North Carolina has played an integral part in that process, with research conducted by North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
The university’s role in industries like aquaculture was outlined in the UNC Tomorrow Report of 2007, which said that universities should “lead economic transformation and community development.”
In mid-February, I ventured to the Sheraton Hotel in Atlantic Beach, to learn more about aquaculture. Despite the dismal weather, scientists, vendors, extension agents, and prospective and current fish farmers turned out in record numbers for the 23rd edition of the North Carolina Aquaculture Development Conference. The N.C. Aquaculture Association, along with a handful of related businesses and industry groups, were sponsors.
According to several speakers, North Carolina’s state government is exceptional in the assistance it provides to the state’s aquaculture industry, through both academic research and university-based extension (i.e., consulting) services. State sponsorship of the industry began with the 1989 Aquaculture Development Act, ordering the Department of Agriculture to provide assistance to fish farmers, and allocating $186,162.
Craig Watson, director of the University of Florida at Gainesville’s tropical aquaculture laboratory and a speaker at the event, praised the state of North Carolina’s support of the industry. “The number of professionals with solid backgrounds is impressive,” he said. “We have some good people here in Florida as well, but not as many or as well distributed geographically and by field of expertise.”
Yet, despite the impressive work the scientists and extension agents are doing, the state’s fish farming industry remains fairly small — generating about $52 million in revenues in 2010, about $2 million less than the previous year. For comparison, the state’s agriculture industry as a whole (aquaculture included) accounted for $9.2 billion in 2009.
Indeed, Watson pointed out that nationwide the aquaculture industry has been in decline for the last decade or so. Large-scale importation of catfish from China and Vietnam has hurt catfish farming, the biggest segment of the market, significantly.
The sluggish state of North Carolina’s aquaculture, in spite of generous government support, raises the question of how much the subsidies are helping the industry.
Yet researchers are working assiduously to lower the costs and increase the yields of fish farming. N.C. State professor Harry Daniels, for instance, has been trying to figure out how to produce higher yields of female flounders. Female flounders grow larger and faster and are therefore more commercially valuable.
Daniels and his fellow researchers have developed interesting ways of producing higher yields of females, though many kinks have yet to be worked out. (As a research assistant last year, I examined hundreds of fish produced using methods designed to yield all females. For some reason, however, all of the fish I examined turned out to be male.)
At the conference, fish farmers were very appreciative of the work being done by the universities. “They bend over backwards” to help, said tilapia farmer Randy Gray from Pikeville. Gray conceded that not all scientific research is valuable, but he was adamant that research related to food supply is critical. “They ain’t making no more land,” he said, “and we’re making lots more people.”
Feed represents one of the largest variable costs in the business, so several researchers have been focusing on ways to cut feed costs. N.C. State’s Russell Borski, for example, is developing fish feed from fermented mechanically deboned poultry meal, and UNC-Wilmington’s Shah Alam has been experimenting with feed made from soybeans. Results so far appear promising.
Marc Turano, the mariculture and blue crab specialist at North Carolina Sea Grant, the state-level subsidiary of a federal agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, oversees the distribution of federal and state dollars to different research endeavors. Turano said the work is important, even if its impact can sometimes be difficult to measure.
“Publishing a paper on fish diets that changes the formulation for a feed on 1000’s of acres of fish farms,” he said, “is not nearly as attractive [in terms of publicity generated] as a new species discovery or anything with climate change these days.”
And so the discussion continues. In the meantime, the conference’s Friday evening “Aquafood festival” featured tank-grown Atlantic sturgeon, cooked Cajun-style.
Government funded or no, it certainly was tasty.
Duke Cheston is a contributor to Carolina Journal.