This year's drought delivered a pricey punch to US aquaculture, the business of raising fish like bass and catfish for food. Worldwide, aquaculture has grown into a $119 billion industry, but the lack of water and high temperatures in 2012 hurt many U.S. fish farmers who were already struggling to compete on a global scale.
At Osage Catfisheries, about one mile off the highway in rural, central Missouri, there are dozens of rectangular ponds with rounded corners. Some of them are empty, some have water, but not one is completely full.
Co-owner Steve Kahrs dons a pair of shorts on an unusually warm December day and surveys his ponds. Today, the water is fairly still with a few ripples from the warm breeze. He stands in front of one pond filled with catfish about eight to 12 inches long and points to the dirty rings circling up a white PVC pipe for about a foot before it becomes white again.
"They're out of the water a ways," he says. "Our average depth is still about five feet. But we're a good 10 or 12 inches down of where we'd keep it."
Down the highway a few miles, Kahrs' office can be found in a small house next to two tiny ponds where his father first started raising fish about 60 years ago. Scattered about the property are sinks and large tubs filled with catfish, bluegill and paddlefish. Kahrs says this year, the drought proved to be tough on the family business — one that sorely depends on water.
"We did fall short on our production numbers that we wanted," he says.
The dry conditions and high temperatures forced many fish farmers here to dig deep to keep their fish healthy and fed. For Kahrs, that meant paying for more energy to pump clean, cool water out of his wells and into the ponds around the clock.
"We probably chewed through about 30 percent more of our power than we did the year before, and the year before was not that good," he says.
It wasn't just the water levels. The soaring temperatures in the summer turned up the burner on the ponds. When that happens, oxygen levels in the water drop and a fish's metabolism slows down. To counteract this, Kahrs says he was pumping water nearly every day from April through September.
Farmers also saw the price of fish feed shoot up because it contains soybean and corn, which underperformed this year because of the drought.
John Hargreaves, a former aquaculture professor at Mississippi State University who now consults for global aquaculture development projects, says acreage of catfish ponds have dropped considerably since the early 2000s. The rising production costs of fish farming, erratic weather and a less expensive type of catfish from Asia have all hurt the catfish industry in the US.
"Production is down, and one of the big drivers for that was the increase in imports of pangasius catfish from Vietnam, China and so forth," he says. "Those imports have substituted for domestic catfish."
Between 2010 and 2011, 20 percent of domestic catfish farms shut down. And as we reported before, seafood imports are also hurting the domestic shrimp market.
So what can fish farmers do to survive the stiff competition and spells of inhospitable weather? Some researchers have been looking into modifying the pond system to make it more energy efficient. Others are experimenting with new feed recipes requiring less expensive ingredients. But, Hargreaves says, even that might be not enough to save this domestic industry.
"There's no silver bullet or game changer. That's for certain," he says.
In the meantime, Kahrs plans to repurpose at least 20 acres of catfish ponds to raise other species, like paddlefish and bass. He hopes they'll be more lucrative. But most of all he's hoping for a solid snowpack this winter and lots of rain in the spring.
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