Kona Bay Oyster & Shrimp Co.
Workers scoop up a basket of shrimp out of a tank.
Big Island firm
hopes upgrade
can reel in
$50 million catch
A Kona Bay aquaculture company
By Jerry Tune
says a new water system can help
produce larger shrimp
Star-BulletinA Big Island aquaculture company is hoping a $65,000 upgrade will help it land a $50 million-a-year business.
The Kona Bay Oyster & Shrimp Co. this month is installing a new $65,000 recirculating water system that will enable the company to more efficiently grow large shrimp for local restaurants and hotels. A second system should be ready in July.
But the real value will be to produce bivalve seed -- the microscopic spawn of oysters and clams that will allow other companies to raise them to a larger size.
Tim Hering, the company's general manager, said worldwide demand for large oysters and clams could make the bivalve seed market worth $50 million a year for the two systems at the Kona facility.
Kona Bay Oyster & Shrimp Co.
New recirculating water tanks for growing shrimp to
their mature size will replace the old ones, above.
The company's innovation is to grow the large shrimp and, at the same time, have the oysters and clams clean out the microalgae effluent created by the shrimp. Hering said that less water is used for this process, and only a little dirty water is discharged into a land sump, a pit lined with plastic to hold the water.The traditional method for cleaning out shrimp farming is to run a lot of water over it and dump that into the ocean, under conditions set by a permit.
Asian countries are so concerned about dumping effluent into the ocean that shrimp farmers now have stopped growing the large shrimp -- which take five months -- and now concentrate on small- or medium-sized shrimp, Hering said.
"Most shrimp out of Asia are small ones because of the effluent problem," he said. "Tiger shrimp take only two months (to grow)."
Large shrimp -- six or eight to a pound -- are difficult to get from the wild.
Kona Bay Oyster & Shrimp stocks oysters, clams and shrimp, and has been supplying them to restaurant clients such as Alan Wong's and Hoku's and to luxury hotels on the Kona Coast.
But the big money will come in growing the bivalve seed to 15 or 20 millimeters long.
"They sell for about $20 to $25 per 1,000," Hering said. "There is a large shortage of bivalve seed."
Each system consists of four 51-foot-diameter tanks connected by four 23-foot-long channels, called "bivalve raceways".
"The system is profitable just on the shrimp, so we basically produce the bivalve for free," Hering said. The first product from the two new systems is scheduled to be available in October.
The six-employee company operates from 2.4 acres at Keahole and expects to expand to seven acres early next year.
A small pilot system has been testing the operation since May 1998. It produces about 20 pounds of shrimp a month.
But the two large systems are expected to produce about 175 pounds of large shrimp a week.
Hering said they have some contracts to supply the bivalve seed to the East Coast, and are talking to the Maoris, who have secured ocean rights for farming in New Zealand.
If the New Zealand market develops, the Kona company will have a year-round buyer of its bivalve seed, he said.
Kona Bay Oyster & Shrimp resulted from a University of Hawaii oyster and shrimp project started in 1993 by Jaw-Kai Wang, a university professor.
The water-recirculating idea came after Wang learned of a Thailand operation that used mussels to partly clean out effluent before it was dumped in the ocean. He decided to try it on a recirculating basis.
Venture capitalists from Hawaii and Singapore provided $600,000 to start the company in 1996. It came from the venture capital firms HMS Inc. of Honolulu and TDF of Singapore.
Then in the summer of 1998, the Kona company decided to expand with the new systems and larger tanks so $700,000 more was pumped into the company by the venture capitalists.
