Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Exit.
Speaker: I'm joined by Carlana Brown, who is the vice president of operations, director of operations at- I'm co-owner and vice president.
Speaker: They just gave me that title.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: The co-owner of RDM Aquaculture, which is a shrimp aquaculture business.
Speaker: And as I understand it, so I watched a video from like 2016 about your operation.
Speaker: It said that you were at the time sort of beginning to expand into other forms of
Speaker: aquaculture with fin fish and crawdads.
Speaker: Is that something that you've done or did you stick with shrimp or what direction did you take?
Speaker: Yeah, we actually have done both.
Speaker: And the crawfish, we just got out of them about a year ago, but we're getting back in.
Speaker: We're redesigning the system.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Because it's, again, it's one of those we did what all the old boys told us to do.
Speaker: And it was so time consuming.
Speaker: We spent four hours every day weighing crayfish.
Speaker: Oh, no way.
Speaker: Because we had, we had roughly around 35 tanks, crayfish tanks, and each one held anywhere from 500 to a thousand crayfish.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And if we had one crayfish in that tank, there was a gram to a gram and a half larger than any others.
Speaker: He could kill 10 to 20 of them off a day.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: That's a pound.
Speaker: And if you have five of them in there, there's five pounds of crayfish I just lost.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So they're just sort of, the big ones are just way more aggressive?
Speaker: They're very aggressive.
Speaker: And plus the way we grew them, we grew them in a clear water system.
Speaker: If you talk to anybody that's ever raised crayfish, they always raise them in brown, murky, dirty water for that reason.
Speaker: So they don't see each other.
Speaker: They can't see each other.
Speaker: So we've developed a new system.
Speaker: We just haven't had the time to put it all back together.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So that's, and the big change that you made is just to make it murkier?
Speaker: No, we're still gonna raise them in clear water because the flavor that we get from them is unbelievable.
Speaker: Plus we've been to a couple of crayfish farms and they smell so badly.
Speaker: And when you're doing tourism, you don't want people coming into a smelly facility.
Speaker: Cause I mean, we're talking about seafood.
Speaker: So that's why we chose to raise them in clear water versus the dark murky water that was literally disgusting.
Speaker: Yeah, so that was kind of one of my questions is so if someone is interested in getting into this business, I got to think that one of the biggest sort of issues is kind of where you're going to put it because it's a big giant tank.
Speaker: And I would think you'd need at least a somewhat climate controlled building.
Speaker: But if you're like doing this in your garage, then you're maybe dealing with moisture issues and smell.
Speaker: So tell me a little bit about like what kind of building you need to get this started.
Speaker: We really, I mean, you can do them in any kind of building, but I don't recommend doing it in your basement.
Speaker: We've had several people do it in their basement.
Speaker: And of course they didn't last too long.
Speaker: But we recommend you can do it in any kind of building, but it just has to be very well insulated.
Speaker: Because you want to keep that climate control.
Speaker: You want to keep the same temperature.
Speaker: So you're not spending a lot more money and trying to heat these tanks up because shrimp are fickle.
Speaker: And if you lose two degrees in two hours, you can kill half your tank of shrimp.
Speaker: But yeah, it is very critical to them.
Speaker: They don't like, shrimp just don't like change, period.
Speaker: So if you can't maintain normalcy for them, they stress and they'll die.
Speaker: So where do you need to be?
Speaker: I mean, like I said, I'm in the middle of Indiana.
Speaker: I mean, we get our building is just very well insulated.
Speaker: We have concrete floors, we have one inch of spray foam and then we've got a R19 fiberglass insulation, a vapor barrier and then we have what's called DuraPlate on our walls, semi trailer siding.
Speaker: You can put anything on your walls just as long as it's easy to clean for mica, pig barn siding, anything, barn siding, anything like that will work.
Speaker: But then we blew in 26 inches of R40 into our ceiling.
Speaker: And again, we have 26 inches in our ceiling, but we also have our ceilings at eight feet because no point in heating something I don't necessarily need.
Speaker: And the higher your ceilings, the less you can keep your tanks heated.
Speaker: And my barns,
Speaker: stay pretty consistent all year long, whether we're at 105 degrees outside or a negative 55 with the wind chill.
Speaker: And what's the temperature you need to maintain?
Speaker: Is it 72?
Speaker: Is it room temperature?
Speaker: What is it?
Speaker: We run ours roughly at around 20.
Speaker: Well, right now they're running 84 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit in the room, but the tanks themselves, we try to run them about 86 to 88 because we heat directly inside our tanks.
Speaker: So that way we're not wasted any heat.
Speaker: I see.
Speaker: So you're warming the water and that's sort of keeping the water.
Speaker: He's the air.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: OK, well, you need the air to heat your tanks.
Speaker: Your barn is going to be like a sauna.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That makes sense.
Speaker: You're not going to want to work in it because it's so hot.
Speaker: And we actually lost a client for just that reason.
Speaker: A client who was buying your PLs.
Speaker: He was buying our PLs.
Speaker: He bought our system.
Speaker: He was up and going.
Speaker: And in less than six months, he shut it down because we told him not to heat the building.
Speaker: But his furnace guy or heating guy told him to heat the building because, yeah, if you heat it, it is going to keep the humidity down.
Speaker: But he couldn't work it.
Speaker: He said it was just miserable in there.
Speaker: And if you can't work it, you're sure you're going to die.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So we have a vent system that draws the humidity out.
Speaker: But I mean, I'm not talking a huge vent.
Speaker: I mean, I got a vent that's probably no bigger than this on the wall of my largest production barn.
Speaker: We don't have we don't have water coming off the ceiling or anything like that, but it is roughly around 84 percent humidity.
Speaker: So when you were starting out, I'm guessing that you already had a barn that you converted.
Speaker: No, we actually built the first.
Speaker: You built the barn.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Cause the original barn that we had on this property is a hundred and some years old.
Speaker: And so we built a brand new building for it.
Speaker: So if someone wanted to get started from the ground floor, let's say they've got the land, but they don't have a building.
Speaker: If you were to do this sort of knowing what you know now from the beginning, what would you want to kind of have in your pocket as far as a startup investment?
Speaker: To do an eight tank system, you're looking at roughly around $100,000.
Speaker: That includes your heat source, your generator, your tank system, your testing kit, your consulting, that includes everything.
Speaker: The easiest one I'm giving you is your heat source.
Speaker: We use a tankless water heater and we are on LP gas, but you can use solar.
Speaker: Solar in turn is gonna cost you about 25 to $30,000.
Speaker: You can use a pellet stove, that's about 15,000.
Speaker: My tankless water heater is $4,700.
Speaker: But this is where, that's where it's your choice on how you wanna do this.
Speaker: If you have natural gas, of course your cost is even gonna be less than what that is.
Speaker: Your generator, you can depend on the size you want.
Speaker: We have a 40 kilowatt because when we started, we used these massive one horsepower pumps that we had to make sure we can get it started.
Speaker: Well, now we don't use one horsepower pumps.
Speaker: I have a one horsepower regenerator blower that does eight tanks.
Speaker: So I don't need a large generator to jumpstart everything.
Speaker: Kind of runs through the whole system.
Speaker: Yeah, and so this is why, you know, like I said, that's why I just give everybody a rounded up number of roughly $100,000 minus the building.
Speaker: Because the building is the one factor I cannot even begin to comprehend.
Speaker: Because if you're going to do a new building, we just added a building four and a half years ago.
Speaker: It's a 50 by 100.
Speaker: That holds 12 tanks and we got plenty of room for office lab.
Speaker: We got, that's where our crayfish were at.
Speaker: That's where they're going back in at.
Speaker: We have 12 tanks in there.
Speaker: So we have plenty of room.
Speaker: And that building was a little over $50,000.
Speaker: But if you already have an existing building, for example, we're working with somebody right now.
Speaker: The gentleman is in,
Speaker: one of the dakotas i'm sorry i can't think of which one he's in but anyhow he um bought a whole block and on this block is a like a hundred year old school building so we're converting part of it into the shrimp farm oh nice so we're taking classrooms so there you know again that's a cost that i can't even begin to factor in yeah
Speaker: So if it's, if it's a hundred K and you've got that, that's, you know, you're, you're, you're targeting like eight tanks for that kind of investment.
Speaker: What if, if you're starting from eight tanks, what would you kind of expect the revenue on eight tanks to be?
Speaker: Not a whole lot.
Speaker: Your first year is going to suck because your survival rates are going to be low.
Speaker: And the only reason your survival rate, it's nothing you're doing, you just don't have enough bacteria to sustain all the shrimp.
Speaker: And it takes one year to build up this bacteria.
Speaker: And this is why we like to start everybody out with an eight tank system.
Speaker: We don't want you to go and start out with 32 tanks because it's a lot harder to build that bacteria up where you're doing eight tanks.
Speaker: It's not as hard to build it up.
Speaker: And then you also don't have as much money invested and you don't feel like you're going in a hole.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because your first year you will make money and it'll be paying all your bills, but you're not going to have a whole lot left over for your own profit.
Speaker: I would say you're going to have pocket change left over.
Speaker: But the second year is when everything flips.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And this is where we want you to start adding on because an eight tank system, unless you're diversifying an already farm, I mean, like if you already have chickens or you have cows or something like that, to add another source of income, which is going to get you roughly around 15 to 20,000 a year, that takes three hours a day.
Speaker: This is a good way to do it.
Speaker: But if you really want to make this a business, an eight tank system ain't going to bring it to you.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: But we try to take everybody doing the baby steps because doing the baby steps is the best way to build this operation up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's, it's, you view it as almost like a, maybe passive income is the wrong word, but a, a low labor intensive put in the, the investment ahead of time.
Speaker: And then you sort of get the profit without a whole lot of upkeep.
Speaker: And your second year is when everything is going to flip because now you've got great bacteria, your overhead costs are going to come way down and your survival rate is going to go up, which means at the end, more money in your pocket.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But this isn't an operation to where you can just go and throw shrimp in and say, magically grow.
Speaker: It is a commitment of seven days a week.
Speaker: We call them divas for a reason.
Speaker: They don't like change.
Speaker: And the thing is, nothing's going to happen overnight.
Speaker: But if you're not paying attention in four days,
Speaker: You can have one, two, three or four tank full of dead shrimp.
Speaker: I lost two full tanks of shrimp in one day for just that reason.
Speaker: We didn't test for three days.
Speaker: I saw in the video that you do nine water quality checks per day.
Speaker: Is there a way to scale this when you're like, if you're doing other things or is it kind of like you need to be kind of at home all day to do this?
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: That's why I loved it when we first started this out.
Speaker: I only had to work two and a half hours a day.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I mean, I had a day job that I drove an hour to.
Speaker: So my husband would come in in the morning and I would have all the feed ready and he would do a DO reading or dissolved oxygen reading.
Speaker: And then I would come in and do all the testing in the evening.
Speaker: I was done in two, two and a half hours, but that included all their testing, feeding, getting feed set up for the next day and cleaning.
Speaker: And then on Saturdays, we would do testing, the two of us together, and we'd get it done in about an hour.
Speaker: And then we would move shrimp, move tanks around, whatever needed to be done.
Speaker: Even like I said, right now, I run 19 production tanks, seven intermediate tanks, and I run anywhere from six to 10 nursery tanks every month.
Speaker: I have everything done in three hours.
Speaker: Three and a half hours.
Speaker: Now for the first six months, you will do all nine tests, because that's the only way you're going to get to understand how your bacteria water actually works.
Speaker: You have eight tanks, you have eight ecosystems.
Speaker: So with those eight ecosystems, you got to maintain them.
Speaker: You can't just do tank one and assume the rest of them are the same.
Speaker: After six months, we train you.
Speaker: Like I said, we've talked to you.
Speaker: We work with you every day for the first six months to keep from losing our clients because this is where everybody gets bored.
Speaker: They quit testing.
Speaker: Shrimps start dying.
Speaker: They don't understand.
Speaker: So we stretch out your testing.
Speaker: So every Monday is a full test.
Speaker: You will do all nine tests every Monday.
Speaker: So that gives you a base to start your numbers with.
Speaker: Now we will do all meters.
Speaker: Meters take up five of your nine tests.
Speaker: Those don't cost you a dime, maybe 15, 20 minutes of your time.
Speaker: That includes your dissolved oxygen, a pH meter, your amoff cone or your settled solids, and that's it.
Speaker: That's five of your tests.
Speaker: The next thing is your reagents.
Speaker: Now on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, we only test for alkalinity.
Speaker: I've already done an ammonia test.
Speaker: I have zero ammonia in my tank, so I don't need to test every day.
Speaker: And ammonia is your most expensive test that you're going to do.
Speaker: Yeah, Wednesdays and Fridays, we do a nitrite test.
Speaker: Sundays are meters only.
Speaker: So I mean, I've cut that way down in half.
Speaker: After the first year, we go from the reagents to what we call API testing.
Speaker: So instead of paying 27 cents a test per tank, we're paying about 8 cents.
Speaker: But the reason I don't want you to use those in the beginning is the reagents are going to give you a much truer number.
Speaker: The API test, which are strips mostly or drops, they're not as accurate.
Speaker: And if you don't know what you're looking at, you can make a huge mistake.
Speaker: So how are you modifying the tanks?
Speaker: Like, how are you responding to that data?
Speaker: Are you adding baking soda?
Speaker: Like, what goes into the tank?
Speaker: If you have too much ammonia, what's the easiest way to get rid of ammonia?
Speaker: Cut their feed.
Speaker: They don't produce as much waste.
Speaker: If your nitrites are up, you back off your feed because they're producing too much.
Speaker: So, I mean, it's little things like that.
Speaker: I mean, we give you a feed chart, but it's not in concrete.
Speaker: You have to base it on your tanks and how the shrimp are.
Speaker: We add baking soda for the alkalinity.
Speaker: We add calcium carbonate to harden our water even more because it is what keeps your alkalinity balanced.
Speaker: We add simple syrup as a carbon source for our bacteria.
Speaker: Other than that, we don't do anything to the tanks.
Speaker: And it's not a quick fix either.
Speaker: Because if you're having a problem, it took several days to get to this.
Speaker: It's going to take several days to fix it.
Speaker: But the problem is, in the meantime, you are going to lose a few shrimp.
Speaker: So it's kind of like you're making modest corrections.
Speaker: You're not overcorrecting because then it'll lag.
Speaker: And that's why we highly recommend testing every single day.
Speaker: I saw that you supply PLs to other suppliers, to other shrimp farmers.
Speaker: Can you tell me a little bit about the added challenge of raising the larvae versus just buying and raising them?
Speaker: If your first year, when you have no bacteria, you have to purchase a minimum of 30,000 PLs.
Speaker: Your stocking density is only 3,500 per tank.
Speaker: Doing our A tank system, you do two tanks one month, two tanks the next month, two tanks and so on.
Speaker: So your first time out, when you get all these PLs in, you might only get a thousand of them to survive.
Speaker: So now you don't even have enough to stock one tank to get you going.
Speaker: So you're already going backwards.
Speaker: So what we do is we offer the PLs or feeder shrimp as we call them for the first year.
Speaker: After that, I want you to start doing your own because now you're expanding.
Speaker: Now you can use more.
Speaker: And getting that 30,000, you can actually do a four to five tank rotation with that.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So that's like, that's just a startup.
Speaker: You're buying the PLs just to startup.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Plus, that's the only way I can give you my bacteria water.
Speaker: We have to haul the PLs and the bacteria water.
Speaker: I can't ship it to you.
Speaker: It needs the shrimp to survive.
Speaker: So it's almost like a sourdough starter where you've got the bacteria water that the shrimp are kind of...
Speaker: saturated in and that sort of spreads into the tank.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Okay, cool.
Speaker: So you said in your video way back that you were getting 15 to 18 pounds, 15 to $18 a pound for your shrimp.
Speaker: Has that market fluctuated?
Speaker: I know at the time you were maybe the only game in town.
Speaker: Has that changed?
Speaker: Right now, we still sell our shrimp at $18 a pound, whether you get 30 count or 20 count.
Speaker: Our larger ones, we do have some that are like at the 15, 16 count.
Speaker: I don't like selling them that large, but sometimes they just happen to get that large.
Speaker: We do sell those at $22 a pound.
Speaker: No, I struggle.
Speaker: I can't keep up.
Speaker: And we sell everything right out our front door.
Speaker: And if you see where I'm located, we're amazed.
Speaker: We are 100% amazed because I'm not on my way to anything.
Speaker: I mean, people drive two hours out of their way just to come and get two pounds of shrimp.
Speaker: And because the flavor and the fact that it's a good quality product,
Speaker: People are willing to do that.
Speaker: We get new customers all the time.
Speaker: And I'm amazed at that because we don't advertise.
Speaker: I have a website and I have a Facebook page.
Speaker: That's it.
Speaker: We don't pay for advertising.
Speaker: So you're not primarily a business to business type operation.
Speaker: Are you selling to restaurants and groceries or?
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: But I was picky as to what restaurants got my product.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: There were only two restaurants in Chicago that were allowed to have my product.
Speaker: We've been in other restaurants, but I pulled from them.
Speaker: The minute you freeze my product, you're done.
Speaker: Ah, guys, if they freeze my product, then they're not going to want to continue paying 16, $18 a pound because they can get a frozen product for $7 a pound.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So all of our restaurants we've ever been in, they have to sign a contract with me stating if I ever find out they freeze it, they will no longer get it.
Speaker: Now, for four years up until COVID, we were in two major restaurants in Chicago, the Marriott on Lakeshore Drive and the Palmer House, both of them.
Speaker: And they only got my shrimp on Thursday or Friday.
Speaker: But I also limit them as to how much they got because you're not going to sell 100 pounds in a couple of days.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you got.
Speaker: Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker: You can't.
Speaker: So they can't sell 100 pounds in two days.
Speaker: What are they going to do?
Speaker: They're going to freeze it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So we limit them to 40 to 45 pounds.
Speaker: Were they happy with me?
Speaker: No, but they kept taking it every week.
Speaker: So I don't think they were that upset with me.
Speaker: And do those commercial customers still come to you or do you ship to them?
Speaker: We actually drove it to them and we charged a delivery fee.
Speaker: When we started out, we did restaurants only.
Speaker: We didn't think anybody would drive out here.
Speaker: So all of a sudden our neighbors were coming in.
Speaker: So we decided to put in store hours, Fridays, four to seven, Saturdays, nine until noon.
Speaker: Well, then people were showing up on Monday.
Speaker: They were showing up on Tuesday.
Speaker: And our business started to grow so much that I quit my day job and then I work this.
Speaker: But our hours were nine until noon.
Speaker: Now, all of a sudden, we're open six days a week from nine until five.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: It almost seems like it's the market is sort of functionally limitless for an individual person.
Speaker: producer and it's more just a question of like how much you can afford to scale it up yeah and that's the thing you've got to figure out because like i said retail works for us i'm not for sure how or why it does because but it does and i mean you know i'm very blessed and very grateful for it but we've had farms that we've gone to that i think would be fabulous for retail but for whatever reason they can't get people in
Speaker: Well, if you can't get them in, you can't sell the shrimp.
Speaker: So you've got to be able to be willing to be flexible and find out what's going to work in your market.
Speaker: So you may have to only do restaurants and grocery stores.
Speaker: That's fine.
Speaker: My husband hates the retail side of it because it's iffy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, we might go a week without selling a single shrimp.
Speaker: And then the next week we've sold two to 300 pounds in three days.
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: So, I mean, that's why he hates the retail.
Speaker: We're wholesale.
Speaker: He loved those Thursday mornings when we would harvest out the shrimp and we would ship it off to Chicago.
Speaker: He loved it.
Speaker: And, you know, cause you guaranteed a paycheck every week.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: If I was closer to town or if I had a brick and mortar building in town, I'd probably be constant.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because, you know, on average, you have to drive 30 minutes to get to my place.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so that's why I said I feel very blessed because we average 300 to 500 pounds at our front door.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And that's just the retail side of it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's why sometimes we literally we run out of shrimp because we can't keep up with everything that's coming our way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm not saying I got empty tanks.
Speaker: I'm just saying the shrimp are small and we need them to grow.
Speaker: Is there a way to expand that without building more tanks or is just kind of like you're limited by the tank size?
Speaker: You're limited by the tank size.
Speaker: You're only going to get anywhere in your first, you know, like I said, we always talk about your first year based on a 30 to 50% survival rate.
Speaker: But this is why we talk about at a 90% or 80 to 90%, which is about three years in three to four years in, you're going to be producing roughly 100 pounds of shrimp per tank every three months.
Speaker: in a 14 foot tank now when you go up in size of course now you can be doing 200 pounds or 300 pounds so that's where like i said because we like to start everybody out on the smaller tanks but again that's only so that you're not filled because you got to keep your day job and i don't want somebody working eight hours at a what should be a part-time job and then working your eight hours at your normal job because guess which one's going to give
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The business is going to get because you need to pay your bills.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So you're going to stay working your eight hour job because it's the only one bringing in money for the first year.
Speaker: But when you go to your second year, I don't want you to expand with 14 foot tanks.
Speaker: We want you to go to 16, 18 or 20, whatever you feel comfortable with, because that's only going to increase how many shrimp you produce and how much more you can sell.
Speaker: I'm sure that it varies from state to state, but what was sort of your process as far as legal and regulatory getting this to where you were approved to sell these things commercially?
Speaker: That was actually quite humorous.
Speaker: Nobody knows where to put us.
Speaker: We don't fall under any category.
Speaker: We are saltwater shrimp in the middle of Indiana.
Speaker: There's no laws.
Speaker: There is nothing, but we do, and all of our clients do the same thing.
Speaker: We act as if we are under rules and regulations.
Speaker: I mean, I ran school cafeterias.
Speaker: I had to work with the health department.
Speaker: We worked with the USDA.
Speaker: So I've got some understanding of what they're looking for and what to do.
Speaker: So all of our farms and everybody we work with are under those same challenges.
Speaker: Because if they ever do come in and start regulating this, you're already doing it.
Speaker: In the state of Indiana, they still don't have any desire to come after us because we're doing everything right.
Speaker: Got it.
Speaker: as if we are being health inspected.
Speaker: I mean, we actually have food service certification, a HACCP certification, livestock certification.
Speaker: They're not necessary, but we went ahead and got them.
Speaker: We invite the USDA, the FDA and their health inspector in every year.
Speaker: By inviting them in, which nobody ever invites these people in, but by inviting them in, they understand what we're about.
Speaker: And so it gives them a clear understanding.
Speaker: I mean, I can sit and tell them, but unless they actually see it.
Speaker: And then it also helps you as the farmer.
Speaker: If somebody reads an article about some fish farm somewhere else and about how they're being environmentally blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker: They're going to go to your health inspector and they're going to complain about you.
Speaker: Now, if that health inspector doesn't know he contacts you, he has to go on the word of the first person and not you.
Speaker: But if he's been to your facility, he's actually going to tell that guy that's not how he does it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We've seen it actually three times.
Speaker: And one time I got so angry and I don't get angry very often, but my Irish comes up sometimes.
Speaker: And we were these two young kids were looking to get a facility.
Speaker: They purchased this land.
Speaker: And in order to get their driveway in, they had they had to get a five foot easement because it was on a bridge.
Speaker: So they asked us to come to the meeting because they were all, all these people were asking them questions and they couldn't answer them.
Speaker: So we went to the meeting with them.
Speaker: 50 people showed up to protest this shrimp farm.
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: And the thing about it was their questions were so stupid.
Speaker: The first person gets up and she's, well, I'm highly allergic to shrimp.
Speaker: Can they guarantee me I won't have a reaction?
Speaker: I looked at her and I go, do you not go to a grocery store?
Speaker: Do you not go to a restaurant?
Speaker: Yeah, I said they all have shrimp and they all serve it.
Speaker: I said, and do you think they're going to stand on their front porch and throw shrimp at you next.
Speaker: I mean, there were several other in between and they just got dumber and dumber.
Speaker: This one was the best of them all.
Speaker: She has horses and she wanted to know if if there was a tornado, what would happen?
Speaker: I looked at her and I go, well, I guess if it hits their barn, all the shrimp are dead.
Speaker: She says, well, no, no, no, no.
Speaker: She goes, you guys use salt water.
Speaker: She goes, wouldn't that be a problem for my horses to drink it?
Speaker: So if you go into the tornado, there's a lot of water or rain, which will dilute any of your salt.
Speaker: And you're more worried about your horses drinking salt water than the septic tank that's running out.
Speaker: I said, and that's your biggest concern?
Speaker: I was like, and I mean, and this is how it got.
Speaker: And I mean, after the 50th one went through, I just stood there and I looked at those two young kids and I said, Sal, get the hell out of this county.
Speaker: These people are morons.
Speaker: I mean, I have never said anything like that about anybody in my life.
Speaker: I'm usually very professional, but I was so angry.
Speaker: I couldn't, I'm like, these were the stupidest things I'd ever heard.
Speaker: That's funny.
Speaker: And so this is, they're actually, I just got contacted by them again.
Speaker: They bought new property and they're looking to go forward again.
Speaker: Oh, good.
Speaker: They're in a different part of the state.
Speaker: So this is why we talk about, I mean, but by having the health department in, they understand.
Speaker: We had another one.
Speaker: We had a guy over in New York, $4 million in his building because he was wanting to do double levels.
Speaker: So, I mean, most of it was in the infrastructure because you had to support those tanks.
Speaker: And some guy read about a fish farm here in Indiana, which granted this farm did deserve all the bad publicity they got.
Speaker: And so they went to the newspaper and told him about his shrimp farm was just like that.
Speaker: But he hadn't gone to the health department and had him in to look at what he was doing.
Speaker: So it became this huge ordeal.
Speaker: And like I said, the health department had to side with the first guy because they didn't know.
Speaker: The trick basically is just to be really, to get to know your inspectors and get to know everybody that's making those calls.
Speaker: That makes sense to me.
Speaker: They will, when you do call them up, they're probably gonna laugh at you and say, what, a shrimp farm?
Speaker: Yeah, they did that to me and they have to come to your facility if you invite them out.
Speaker: They have to come out.
Speaker: They're going to sit and tell you, well, we don't know what to do or anything like that.
Speaker: But how I got them into ours is I just told them, I said, hey, I want to make sure we're doing everything correctly.
Speaker: If you were to inspect us, could you make any suggestions so we are doing everything correctly?
Speaker: One of the things that you mentioned is sort of the environmental and
Speaker: health impact of the way that shrimp are sometimes produced overseas and how your way is different
Speaker: Can you talk a little bit about that?
Speaker: And it's very disgusting.
Speaker: I've visited 14 different countries.
Speaker: I've been to Vietnam.
Speaker: We've been to China.
Speaker: We've been to Thailand.
Speaker: We've been to India, the major shrimp sources.
Speaker: And the reason I go there is because I'm training them on what we do here because they know that the product they're offering isn't that good.
Speaker: But the amazing thing is, is all the farms that we've helped, not a single one of them sell their shrimp to the U.S. It all goes into the European market.
Speaker: Because out of the 96% of the shrimp we eat is imported into this country.
Speaker: Out of that 96%, only 2% is inspected.
Speaker: Out of that 2%, 60% is rejected.
Speaker: And then what they do is if they reject it, they go sit out past the three mile markers, which puts you in international waters.
Speaker: They sit there for two or three days.
Speaker: They bring it back in.
Speaker: How well do you think that shrimp's actually looking by now?
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: What are the odds of them getting caught?
Speaker: They bring it in.
Speaker: Now they're going to, if they do get caught, now they're going to run it down through Mexico.
Speaker: They're going to bleach it, cook it and add food coloring to it.
Speaker: We've been in the farm I was working at in Vietnam, very southern tip of Vietnam.
Speaker: A lot of smaller farmers that produce, you know, like a thousand pounds, you know, one particular one.
Speaker: He was taking his generator, pumping his water out.
Speaker: It was leaking gas directly to where a shrimp were shrimp absorbed their environment.
Speaker: My question was, what are you going to do with that shrimp?
Speaker: He tells me we sell to America because they'll eat anything.
Speaker: Oh man.
Speaker: We've literally seen to wear certain places in the country where they're injecting them with silicone because what happened about eight years ago, there was a nasty disease that every country that produced shrimp outdoors, every one of them in a three month period lost over 90% of their country shrimp.
Speaker: So there was a while there where we couldn't get big shrimp and you still don't see too many jumbo shrimp around.
Speaker: And so, but you can't see silicone, but it's there in your meat.
Speaker: And when you cook it, where does that go?
Speaker: That goes directly into your meat.
Speaker: Oh, that's so gross.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: That's why I can't touch shrimp out.
Speaker: We've seen it.
Speaker: We've seen the thing in Mexico where they bleach it and add food coloring.
Speaker: It is the most disgusting thing you've ever done.
Speaker: We raise pigs.
Speaker: Pigs smell.
Speaker: My pig burns with roses compared to this.
Speaker: And so this is why, and I think that's a lot of people are starting to understand.
Speaker: We've actually saw where villages to where they have like this central pond outside their little village, all their septic, all their chemicals, everything goes into that pond.
Speaker: That's where the shrimp are at.
Speaker: We've sent them to where farmers will put them under their cows or their pigs or their chickens.
Speaker: The only food they get is from the animal above.
Speaker: Now, the food that the pig or the chicken eat are loaded with antibiotics and hormones, which are now coming down into their food.
Speaker: Now, most of our shrimp, the reason they get rejected is due to those antibiotics and hormones because they're actually banned in the United States, but it's coming in through our food.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And I would love to see more and more of these shrimp farms because I one day want to be able to eat shrimp in a restaurant.
Speaker: I can't.
Speaker: And my friends can't either.
Speaker: Once they've had our shrimp, they don't eat shrimp out for that same reason, because ours has the meat sperm.
Speaker: It's not slimy like it is anymore.
Speaker: It doesn't have a fishy smell or a strange smell to it.
Speaker: And it is just the sweetest meat you'll ever taste.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And that's what sells it.
Speaker: I mean, I have a lady that lives an hour and a half away and every month she comes in at least four or five times every single month.
Speaker: And she only takes two pounds every time.
Speaker: So what do you feed them?
Speaker: It is a specific diet made for our system.
Speaker: It comes from a company called Ziegler and in the production side of it, they do a 35% protein, which consists of fish meal, corn meal, and soy meal.
Speaker: They're working very hard to get rid of the fish meal.
Speaker: That is my biggest complaint is the fish meal, but you can't put more soy because shrimp are actually allergic to soy.
Speaker: The soy will literally burn their digestive system.
Speaker: And if you burn their digestive system, they can't eat, they die.
Speaker: They can have a small amount and they're fine, but they can't have a whole lot.
Speaker: So the fish meal is your main protein source.
Speaker: Then there's algae and vitamins that would be natural to their area.
Speaker: It's a little pellet food for us to manufacture it ourselves is something we thought about doing.
Speaker: But in order to buy an extruder, you're talking about six or seven million dollars.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So I haven't even come close to spending that much money buying feed from them.
Speaker: And food is your least cost, really, because it's one pound of food to every pound of shrimp.
Speaker: So what we tell everybody is an average.
Speaker: You're going to use roughly one 55 pound bag of feed every month for every 14 foot tank.
Speaker: So you're basically less than one to one food ratio.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So your big overheads be, I imagine, power if you're heating that water continuously, especially in the wintertime.
Speaker: Well, we don't heat the water continuously.
Speaker: We actually have thermostats set on it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So what is your big overheads, your big items as far as cost?
Speaker: My labor cost.
Speaker: Labor cost.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: But my labor cost is because I get a heck of a salary.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So yeah, my husband and I get, we get, we get really nice salaries now, plus our profit at the end of the year.
Speaker: Well, right now we only have one other employee and that's my son.
Speaker: And we've had other employees.
Speaker: It just made my life a little bit easier, but I really don't need them.
Speaker: And that's been part of our problem because in reality, I only need an employee for four hours a day.
Speaker: Rest of the time, like I said, and trying to find stuff for them to do all the time.
Speaker: It's a little difficult sometimes.
Speaker: So, you know, short of paying yourself and sort of the value of your labor, you're keeping the heat on, you're buying feed.
Speaker: So I don't know if you circulate the water or do you, because I mean, it seems like you want to maintain that kind of bacterial environment.
Speaker: So the water stays inside the tank.
Speaker: We do not.
Speaker: Like I said, my water is 11 years old.
Speaker: We've been reusing our water since we started.
Speaker: Do you need to oxygenate it or aerate it or does that take care of itself?
Speaker: Well, it's aerated to a point.
Speaker: We actually have air stones, but the air stones are mostly to keep everything in suspension.
Speaker: Because if that bacteria was to settle out, it becomes a super thick sludge, it'll suffocate out your shrimp.
Speaker: So we have a volcano, what we call a volcano in the center.
Speaker: It's just a solid drum with air stones.
Speaker: It's designed to bring everything up and out.
Speaker: But the air lifts around the outside are what actually produce your oxygen.
Speaker: It's just a PVC pipe with an air stone.
Speaker: So I have a current at the bottom.
Speaker: We're forcing water up through a PVC pipe, which produces oxygen.
Speaker: And then I have a third current at the top.
Speaker: So I don't need pumps, filters, or anything like that.
Speaker: A lot of farmers tell us that we need a protein skimmer.
Speaker: We've done protein skimmers.
Speaker: They actually destroy my bacteria.
Speaker: So it's basically your water is a duplication of the ocean.
Speaker: The ocean doesn't have protein skimmers.
Speaker: She doesn't have pumps.
Speaker: She doesn't have filters.
Speaker: She has natural.
Speaker: And so that's what our job is, is just to maintain the bacteria water.
Speaker: As long as your water does fine, your shrimp do fine.
Speaker: I know that I saw from your background that you and your husband have experience and credentials
Speaker: sort of in agriculture in this business.
Speaker: No, he does, not me.
Speaker: Okay, okay.
Speaker: So is that something where a novice can kind of get a packet that has sort of the resources and the information they need, or is that something where they sort of consult with you over the long process?
Speaker: With our consulting, what we do is we actually take out 18 months of your learning curve.
Speaker: I mean, you can learn this all on your own, but I will be honest with you, it'll be very difficult because it'll be like my first three years.
Speaker: We had a consultant, we lost a million shrimp my first year, nearly a million the second year.
Speaker: Our consultant never raised a shrimp in his life.
Speaker: We found that out.
Speaker: But once we figured this out and we started doing things based on what the shrimp want and not what people tell us that we're supposed to be doing, it made all the difference because I work for the shrimp.
Speaker: They don't work for me.
Speaker: I work for them.
Speaker: If you want them to survive, you have to make sure that everything is good for them.
Speaker: And so that's what we do.
Speaker: But our consulting is it's classified as a one year consulting contract.
Speaker: But what it actually is, it's ongoing forever.
Speaker: Okay, after six months, what we do is we work with you every single day for the first six months.
Speaker: We don't, it's not that we don't like bringing people here to train them because we love helping people out.
Speaker: But the problem is my water is 11 years old.
Speaker: You're starting out.
Speaker: There are things that you need to do that I have no way to show you here because we're so far advanced on that.
Speaker: And there's things that we do that you can't do for at least the first two years.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So this is where it gets a little confusing when we bring people in because then when you go home,
Speaker: You're like, well, we didn't do that at your place and I'm trying to explain it to you.
Speaker: So what we do is we teach you how to do the testing in the manual that we give you along with the consulting.
Speaker: It's, I mean, if you're a kindergartner and you can read, you can actually follow these directions.
Speaker: But what we do is you do the water quality, you send it to me and then I look it over and then I send you back telling you what you need to do and explaining to you why we're doing what we're doing.
Speaker: So it's ongoing education for six months.
Speaker: After the first six months, you're going to have a pretty good idea of something.
Speaker: You know, if you're alkaline and it goes out of whack, you're going to know how to fix it and what to do.
Speaker: But the thing is, year two comes along and bacteria is going to start changing.
Speaker: It just does.
Speaker: It's bacteria.
Speaker: So now you see things happening in your tank.
Speaker: Well, don't sit there and try to fix them on your own.
Speaker: Call me.
Speaker: I've already been through that and I can tell you how to fix it.
Speaker: And so we work with you on that.
Speaker: So how do you, is there sort of a fixed fee associated with that?
Speaker: Is it a profit sharing?
Speaker: How do you monetize that?
Speaker: We just have a flat fee of $10,000 for our consulting.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Like I said, it's ongoing for as long as you're in the business.
Speaker: The contract isn't going to say that.
Speaker: My lawyer won't let us say that, but I tell her about it.
Speaker: Because, you know, I mean, she wants us to charge you per hour for text messaging, phone calls.
Speaker: And I'm like, you know, I don't have time to keep track of all of that stuff.
Speaker: Plus, I personally feel that if you've already paid for your consulting and it's two years, three years in, and you know you've already paid for it, you're going to pick that phone up and call me.
Speaker: But if you think, well, I got to pay by the hour, $300.
Speaker: Let me see if I can fix this myself.
Speaker: Next thing you know, you're thankful of dead shrimp.
Speaker: Then you call me.
Speaker: I can't do a whole lot for you.
Speaker: Well, it's a fascinating business.
Speaker: I so appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.
Speaker: And it's RDM Aquaculture.
Speaker: I'll give the group contact information if they have any further questions, want to schedule some time with you if you're up for that.
Speaker: Yeah, well, let me send you a packet that we send out that gives you a breakdown of what you need for your building.
Speaker: It gives you a breakdown of all your costs, your continuing costs.
Speaker: It's a pretty good information packet.
Speaker: I can send that on to you as well.
Speaker: Beautiful, beautiful.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker: Really appreciate you come by and talking to us.
Speaker: Oh, no problem.
Speaker: If you have any other questions, don't hesitate.
Speaker: Thank you.
