Near Fowler, Indiana about half an hour northwest of Lafayette, sits a unique type of farm for the heartland of America.  This farm raises corn, beans, nursery plants and marine shrimp.  Darryl Brown, along with his wife, son and mother operate RDM farms. 

Darryl and his family dreamed about adding aquaculture to their operation for years.  After many hours of research, meetings and planning Darryl decided to get into aquaculture raising Pacific White Shrimp.  He compared different commercial systems and chose the heterotrophic shrimp system designed by Aqua-Manna. 

Darryl remodeled some buildings connected to his current greenhouses in December of 2009.  He made a nursery room, big enough to supply over 20 growout tanks and his first growout building holds six growout systems.  In the summer of 2010, he received his first shrimp, 11 days as post larvae (PL 11).  These tiny shrimp were stocked in his nursery where they grew to around ½ gram in four weeks.  Darryl took these shrimp and stocked a couple of his growout tanks and had his first harvest in December 2010.  

The crew of RDM farms had never grown any aquatic animals before this time, so they had a steep learning curve.  Jim Bradley and Bill Blythe from Aqua-Manna helped Darryl through this learning process, helping Darryl with receiving the shrimp, starting the floc system, feeding, handling, determining water quality and selling his product.  Everyday Darryl can email his water quality data to Aqua-Manna for consultation on feeding and other system operations. 

A typical day for Darryl starts with determining water quality:  dissolved oxygen, ammonia, nitrite, alkalinity, pH, floc level are the main water quality parameters.  He then feeds in the morning and afternoon.  During the day he may need to adjust floc levels in the growout, harvest shrimp, or transfer shrimp from the nursery.  Sensors hooked up to an alarm and phone dialer warn him if he loses power, air pressure or a pump quits pumping, so he can respond to any problems.

Once Darryl’s shrimp get over 18 grams he starts to harvest the larger shrimp.  Darryl has several different markets he uses:  he sells them at his nursery building to customers who pre-order or walk up, seasonally at farmers markets along with his nursery plants, live to haulers servicing the Chicago asian markets and to white table cloth restaurants in Lafayette.  Darryl gets from $10 to $20/lb depending upon the size of the shrimp and the market.

  Darryl has plans for expansion this summer.  He has a couple more building to retrofit on the current site to get up to 20 growout tanks.

More Heterotrophic Shrimp System Information