Production is ramping up at Sino Agro Foods’s flagship shrimp aquaculture project in southeastern China, which is planning to stock its first commercial harvests by Q4 2016 and then scale up from there, company officials said.
Sino Agro, a US- and Norway-listed public company that focuses on selling meat and seafood to China’s middle classes, first announced the Zhongshan New Prawn Project (ZSNPP) in 2014, billing it as the world’s largest such shrimp farm. The company has claimed that its use of recirculating aquaculture systems (RAS) on such a grand scale in an urban area that amounts to no less than a paradigm shift in aquaculture.
Built on 600 acres in the middle of China’s Pearl River Delta, a region home to 120 million people, construction is expected to be fully complete by the end of 2025.
When complete, construction of the first phase of the project is expected to have cost $180m, plus or minus 15%.
Test stocking of the facility’s tanks which will be filled with 80% freshwater prawns (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) and the rest with finfish species such as Asian cod, eels and jade perch began in February.
Tony Ostrowski, Sino’s chief scientific officer, told investors during a June earnings call that the initial stockings were meant as “trial and shakedown runs” used to test the new systems.
“We’ll plan to begin commercial stocking as soon as our settling ponds, our new ponds and all of the tanks are complete which should be by the end of this year. We’ll work out the bugs in the system, which aren’t major bugs at all, and training the staff, he said.
Ostrowski said that the biggest hurdle to achieving full production is the completion of the settling ponds which will be needed to handle large volumes of water from the tanks.
Even though it’s a recirculating system, we’re going to be draining water out because of harvests and filling up water and taking out water out of the tanks, he said.
He told Undercurrent News in an email this week that production at the farm is expected to be 1,000t by the end of 2016, 10,000t by 2017, 70,000t by 2020 and at least 130,000t but as much as 300,000t by the time the project is expected to be fully built out by 2025.
These are minimal operational targets. I don’t like to say that our target is 300,000 metric tons because when I even say 100,000t people go, like, yeah, really?’ he told Undercurrent in an interview earlier this year.
The system’s biofilters which Ostrowski said are the key factor in determining the facility’s output are being built with a theoretical production capacity of 300,000t by 2025. But reaching that figure will depend “on further research on biology, selective breeding, nutrition, and system efficiencies,” he added.
The figure would match Vietnam’s 2015 shrimp production, he said. However, the company has said that when eventually built out, the facility’s minimum operating output will be around 130,000t annually.
The project’s ambitious scale is one of the things that attracted Ostrowski, a former president and CEO at Hawaii’s Oceanic Institute, to the project, he said.
This model makes you think differently about how we’re doing aquaculture today. And that’s what’s really exciting about it, he said.
He added that if the company’s approach works in China, it can be replicated elsewhere.
What we’re trying to develop is a sustainable system in one of the most urbanized regions of the world, he said.
The ZNPP isn’t the first aquaculture venture for Sino Agro in China but it is the largest.