- [Narrator] Tastemakers is brought to you with support from Global Foods Market and Midwest Dairy.

(upbeat music) - Shrimp is far and away America's favorite seafood but the vast majority is imported from overseas and farmed unsustainably.

So what is a shrimp lover to do?

Well with the rise in domestic aquaculture, local sustainable seafood might be closer than you think.

(exciting music) I'm Cat Neville and for the past two decades I've been telling the story of local food.

In that time, American food culture has exploded in tiny towns and big cities from coast to coast.

In Tastemakers, I explore the maker movement and take you along for the journey to meet the makers who define the flavor of American cuisine.

It's not easy to find head-on, shell-on shrimp, but when you do, you want to use a recipe that makes the most of it.

So we're gonna head off to Triple J shrimp and when we come back I'm gonna show you an easy Spanish style chili garlic shrimp.

(peaceful music) - We are an old farm family.

When we were children, we started out in the fields.

When we were 10, 12 years old they had us sitting on a John Deere planting, cultivating.

We were always raising row crops, corn, soybeans.

The idea for shrimp farming came from my dad who was reading an article in the Soybean Digest about how they were trying to make a shrimp feed out of soybeans.

That perked his interest, so we started doing some research into shrimp farming.

Found out you actually can do it inland.

Dad came to me and James, my brother and we went and toured a couple other shrimp farms and looked at them and he was like, "We can do that."

We wanted to diversify a little bit and get away from corn and soybeans.

And when we did our research, we found out that shrimp is the most popular seafood choice in the United States.

Most of it that gets here is imported.

So we were looking at a way that we could do something domestically, sustainably, environmentally friendly, and get fresh clean shrimp here in the middle of Missouri.

And here we are.

(birds chirp) Our shrimp are Pacific white lake shrimp.

We chose those shrimp for two basic reasons.

They do really well in intense environments which is basically a high stocking density.

The other reason is they're readily available and we can get them when we need them.

Homegrown shrimp is where we get our shrimp postlarvae from.

When they arrive at this facility they're about 10 days old from hatching from an egg and they're about the size of an eyelash.

We actually had them delivered, they were flown up here overnight.

(door squeaks) (water gurgles) - So we're inside of the farm.

It is a balmy 80 something degrees.

It's very humid.

Why does it have to be so warm in here?

- Wild caught shrimp is caught in the brackish water and that's a much shallower space in the ocean.

And it's warmer there.

- Got it.

- Our shrimp, the warmer it is, the more active they are and they eat a whole lot more when they're more active.

We try to keep our temp between 80 and 85 degrees all year long.

When it starts getting below 80, they kind of go a little dormant and they don't quite eat.

Not that we're losing any shrimp, they just don't grow as fast and it just takes a little longer to get them up to size.

- They're about 10 days old when you get them as little post larval shrimp.

- Little tiny, tiny things.

- Teeny tiny.

So small that their food is liquid.

And then how long does it take until you're ready to harvest?

- The fastest we've gotten is around 90 days from getting them in.

These are our youngest ones that we have right now and they've been here for 66 days.

- Okay.

- And that's just their time including their time in the nursery that they've been in this building.

A lot of people haven't seen a whole shrimp, whole shrimp head-on swimming around.

So our shrimp have a very large head.

And then you have the normal body that everybody's used to seeing.

They also have two different sets of legs.

Their front legs they use to gather food.

Their mouth is actually right here basically in their chest.

The legs underneath the shrimp are basically their swimmer legs.

They have a horn and a sharp tip on the back of their tails.

Those are hard.

And I was used to sitting behind a computer typing in and not really getting my hands roughed up too much.

But with the horn, it will draw blood especially on a long harvest day that you're getting those guys out of the tanks.

They will snap you and it hurts.

They're very strong.

You wouldn't think a little shrimp is that strong but they get after you.

(playful music) - [Catherine] Hi, little guy.

- [Jeffrey] Nice long antenna.

You can see through him.

He's healthy, he's been eating, he's digesting.

- Aw.

What a beautiful little animal.

Bye.

- [Jeffrey] And off they go.

- So that's a 66 day old trip.

- That's a 66 day old from that.

And that's where you've gotten to.

Now 147 days- - Over in that tank.

That is a big shrimp.

- And they're strong, aren't they?

- Yes, they're strong.

Just totally translucent.

Oh.

(laughs) - And there's about 40,000 of them in here.

And they live in here until they're ready for harvest and off they go.

All we do is monitor their living conditions.

Make sure that they're properly fed.

Those are our feeders right there.

Just a old school clocking mechanism and a feeder belt that holds their feed.

So over a 24 hour period, this belt will wind up, drop that feed slowly into the tank.

That's actually better for us than hand feeding because shrimp are grazers and they eat throughout the day.

If you add a whole bunch of feed to the tank at one time, you actually reduce your dissolved oxygen that you have in the tank.

- Oh.

- So this, by spreading it out over a 24 hour period, - It's better for them.

- It's easier on the water and it's easier on us 'cause we can get outta here when we're done.

(Catherine laughs) - The way that Jeff farms is sustainable.

He uses this system that's called Biofloc and he also recycles his water, which means that there is virtually no runoff that he has to dispose of.

(water rushes) - There are two basic theories on raising shrimp.

There is clear water shrimp, basically long troughs and you're constantly filtering out water.

We did research that.

There was a couple problems with that.

First, there was a byproduct that you had to work with afterwards.

Basically shrimp waste and old shrimp feed that wasn't getting used up.

You also had filters constantly running, electricity use, expensive.

So we went with a form what's called Biofloc.

And we've been working on this for seven years.

There's bacteria everywhere.

And what we've done is cultured what's called heterotrophic bacteria.

Our heterotrophic bacteria is an animal.

Guess what it likes to eat?

It likes to eat waste.

So every day we're doing our test making sure that we are in check, making sure that there is no waste in our tanks because my heterotrophic bacteria is consuming it.

- I think a lot of folks when they come through they're probably like, why is the water brown?

Is it dirty?

But it's not.

It's just from the feed that you're giving, is that right?

- Most of the brownness comes from the feed, - Yeah.

- that they eat combined with my heterotrophic bacteria or Biofloc that's in the water which is the white fluffy stuff that keeps moving.

When we do drain a tank and take it to the bottom, there is nothing on the bottom.

- That's amazing.

And so the magic of bacteria, they're in there eating all the shrimp poop essentially.

- Poop, yeah.

- So that keeps it naturally clean and you have very few inputs.

- Exactly and that's on a cost side for us.

If Mother Nature can do the job, let her do it.

- Why not let her?

Yeah.

- Let her do it.

(playful music) - What's the volume of water in all of these tanks?

- [Jeffrey] Each one of them has about 2,500 gallons of water in it.

- Wow.

- So there's a little bit of water in here.

- [Catherine] Well, but the thing is that you're recycling the water.

So you pulled that much water out to start the farm but you don't consume much water to run the farm.

- Every week about, we'll top off the tanks.

We add about an inch.

That's why you can see my little lines right here that we have on the side of the tanks.

I know when I'm low, that's when we add water to the tanks.

But as far as the discharge, no.

- [Catherine] And you use well water.

- [Jeffrey] We do.

- So using well water means that it doesn't have the chlorine and fluoride, - Fluoride.

- and all that kind of stuff.

- When starting up a shrimp farm, a well is very, very important.

We also, the first step, the first, first, first step we did was send off our source water for a testing to see what was in it.

That helped us develop what we needed to do for as far as the filtration system.

- [Catherine] Yeah.

- [Jeffrey] And basically the only main thing we needed to take out was iron.

Other than that, we were pretty well good to go.

So we had pretty good water here.

- I think a lot of people also because we are overfishing our oceans and rivers and streams, they look toward aquaculture.

But a lot of aquaculture isn't sustainable.

This is, but kind of explain how the aquaculture is done in some of the shrimp farms in Southeast Asia.

- A lot of that is done outdoors.

A lot of that uses their natural resources as far as the land next to the ocean.

They will basically ruin that ground by pumping salt water into it.

Basically it kills the soil 'cause they will build ponds next to the ocean, stock it with shrimp and other things from the ocean.

Use that until that pond dies, then move further upstream.

And when they do that that ground's dead and they've salted it.

Vegetation won't grow there so you can't grow cattle or any other livestock.

So you basically just ruined that whole spot.

In here, you're in a building that's 164 by 84, 14 pools the same water and we can do roughly 5,000 pounds a year.

- Now farming shrimp isn't as easy as just throwing feed into a tank.

You have to constantly monitor and adjust the water to make sure those shrimp stay healthy.

- I do 11 different tests on every tank every day.

We test for temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity, alkalinity, pH, nitrates, nitrites, ammonia, carbon dioxide, Biofloc, which is our heterotrophic bacteria and mortality.

Those are the tests that we do.

And those lead us to what we would do with our four inputs.

Our four inputs that we put into the tank are feed.

We'll put in simple syrup that is a supplemental feed source for our bacteria.

We'll put in a probiotic that is dried bacillus or the active culture in yogurt.

We'll also put in on a needed basis sodium bicarbonate or baking soda.

And that just helps us control our pH and our alkalinity of the water.

If you run a shrimp farm properly you can keep everything in check and everything in balance.

It changes over time as you're harvesting shrimp out or when you're stocking at the beginning because your target is always moving, always moving.

And each tank is different.

My Excel spreadsheet on my tracking, on our testing is ridiculous, but you have to watch that because if you lose shrimp, you lost money.

So you don't wanna lose any shrimp.

So make sure that you're making the right decisions on your water quality and on your shrimp health to make sure everything goes right every day.

- I think a lot of consumers are really trying to be conscious when they're making their food choices particularly when it comes to seafood because of overfishing and pollution.

So something like this, which is totally sustainable you can feel really good having a sustainably raised shrimp and still indulge in America's favorite seafood.

- And that's on your social aspect of it.

Once they try our shrimp, even though they're benefiting and helping out the environment if it's a better product too.

- Yeah, then it's a double win.

(cheerful music) - [Jeffrey] Our approach to raising shrimp versus soybean and other corn commodities is we don't treat it as a commodity.

It is a specialty item.

It is a niche item.

(birds chirp) - As the demand for sustainable seafood grows, more and more entrepreneurs are getting into the shrimp business.

And so our next stop is at Homegrown Shrimp, a commercial hatchery that ships shrimp across the country.

(soothing music) - We're at the Homegrown Shrimp Hatchery and Farm Complex which also has a small packing plant and office warehousing in Indiantown, Florida.

We consider ourselves sustainable because we impact no oceans.

We are inland.

We do not use any marine water and we recycle all of the water that we use.

We capture all the waste and then those waste are properly disposed of such that it doesn't impact the environment.

We use only disease-free animals here.

It is under most definitions, I think as sustainable as we can envision sustainable to be today.

Before we came, when I looked at the industry in the United States and in Europe what they lacked was a good animal.

And so that's what we really tried to provide through our homegrown postlarvae that we sell into the US and into Europe is a high health animal with very fast growth potential.

And since we've introduced that animal three years ago, we have seen farms start to get reinvigorated in terms of getting more investment, growing their companies.

And there is the seeds of a real industry taking place and it's based on a shrimp that actually grows well and has high survival.

(birds chirp) It used to be that tuna was the number one seafood in the United States.

Today it's shrimp.

And that has been brought about solely by the advances in shrimp aquaculture producing and providing lower cost shrimp to the US consumer.

(machine whirs) Producing shrimp are a little bit more complicated than sticking them in tanks.

There is a science that is developed in the reproduction of shrimp going back to the late 1960s.

We basically breed the shrimp where they mate and then we collect mated females.

They go into a hatch tank, the eggs are laid, they hatch, and then we collect the first stage larvae and those go into another tank, larval rearing.

They stay in larval rearing for maybe 12 days until they go from a free swimming larvae into what you would recognize as a baby shrimp, a very small baby shrimp.

And it is those very small baby shrimp which we call postlarvae after the larval stage that we sell to farms throughout the United States and Europe.

Or they go to stocking shrimp farms worldwide.

Growing up in Florida, when shrimp were in season because it was all wild shrimp and there was only certain seasons where you could get shrimp, we would have a boil.

We would eat shrimp on a Sunday.

It was a big time for the family.

My father, he brought the first shrimp farm that was in Panama City, Florida a newspaper article maybe in the late 60s to my attention one Sunday and he goes, "This is fantastic.

If they farm these shrimp, you realize we can eat year round.

It won't be seasonal."

And that just kind of stuck with me.

So my whole life has been pursuing basically shrimp to allow people to enjoy shrimp at reasonable costs year round, anytime and anywhere.

And I think that's what probably drives me most.

(easy-going music) - Jeff's grandmother was actually born in the house right over my shoulder.

And today it is home of Defiance Ridge Vineyards.

A wonderful partnership has sprung up.

And so we're gonna head inside for a wine dinner that's paired with Jeff's shrimp.

So we're here tonight for one of Defiance Ridge's monthly wine dinners.

And this time it's all focused on Triple J Farms shrimp.

How is this shrimp different from something that you would get from one of your restaurant suppliers?

- Well, first off and foremost, it's fresh.

It's literally fished from the farm an hour or so before it makes it to us.

When I receive it, I actually receive it on ice.

I mean, it's still alive.

There's nothing fresher than that.

- So multi-course dinner.

But each course that features shrimp you're preparing it in different ways.

Kind of take me through each one of the dishes that we're gonna see tonight.

- [Kristopher] The first course tonight is a shrimp ceviche.

It's actually acid cooked in lemon juice, lime juice and orange juice.

- And the texture of that kind of cured shrimp is going to be completely different from, for example the blackened shrimp that you have with the pasta, right?

- Absolutely.

I will be cooking that on a flat top griddle.

The shrimp is so fresh that it literally cooks in minutes.

- [Catherine] And the wontons, are those kind of like you're ode to a crab rangoon with shrimp?

- Basically.

The wontons have celery in them.

They have peppers and chives, a cream cheese, a local prairie breeze cheese that I serve out here.

It's deep fried and garnished on a tile with several different sauces that are spicy and sweet.

- [Catherine] The final course is your take on a surf and turf.

- [Kristopher] It's a beef tenderloin.

Obviously that's gonna be hard seared in a cast iron skillet.

It's being served with a duchess potato which is basically potato that has egg yolk and it has nutmeg in it.

The shrimp is actually sauted garlic and it's gonna be hit with our house Chardonnay, a little bit of lemon juice, salt and pepper, and a lot of butter.

(heartfelt music) These dinners gives me a chance to totally think out of the box and be creative.

- That's really kind of the exciting thing.

You know the farmer.

You are showcasing his product.

You're developing these menus to make the most of those products.

That has to feel really cool.

- It makes you feel really good at the end of the night when everything's done and over with and everybody's like, "Oh my goodness, that was the best dinner I've had in my life."

And it makes it all worth it.

- We're having one of our farmhouse dinners right now at Defiant Ridge Vineyards.

I grew up in the middle of Missouri, actually.

This area right here is where I spent most of our summers.

This house right here, my grandmother was actually born in and they turned it into a winery.

So it's really cool that we get to share what we do now as far as the shrimp aquaculture with a dinner like this.

- Jeff, I want to introduce you and let you talk about your process.

- Good evening.

How's everybody doing?

Beautiful day.

We're Triple J Farms we raise Pacific white lake shrimp.

The shrimp that you guys are gonna have tonight came to us from a hatchery outside of West Palm Beach, Florida.

Thank you for having us again.

(crickets chirp) - This is wonderful.

But now it is time to head back to my kitchen and get cooking.

(upbeat music) So here I have two pounds of incredibly fresh shrimp with the heads and the shells on and I'm gonna show you how easy it is to make a Spanish style chili garlic shrimp.

It's gonna be delicious and very, very quick.

The main thing that you need to do when you're preparing the shrimp is take your kitchen shears and just run them all the way down the back just to split open the shell.

And now I'm just gonna chop a few cloves of garlic and then head over to the stove.

So I'm putting a lot of good quality olive oil into my pan.

And then I have some paprika and a few dried bird chilies.

They are pretty hot.

And then these are pasilla peppers.

They add a bit of a fruity note to this dish.

So the spices are starting to kind of fry a little bit.

So I'm gonna go ahead and add in some of that chopped garlic.

(pan sizzles) And my shrimp.

While the shrimp are kind of cooking on one side, I'm gonna go ahead and add in a little bit of dry wine.

This is actually the wine I'm gonna be pairing the dish with, which is a Vignole.

You're gonna cook them for about three minutes on one side and then flip them over.

Maybe a minute or two on the other, and then they're done.

I'm gonna sprinkle these guys with a little bit of salt, pour the oil on top, and I'm gonna finish everything up with just a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkling of parsley.

In every episode, I pair my dishes with a type of grape that you might not be familiar with.

And this one is Vignole.

It is a hybrid grape that was developed in New York and it's grown extensively throughout the Midwest.

And it has a kind of like pineappley.

Not sweet necessarily, but really fruity character, kind of like a Riesling.

And so it pairs really well with spicy dishes just like the shrimp.

(easy-going music) Now, when you have one of these guys you want to break off the head.

And the reason why we went ahead and split open the shell is for ease of eating because now you just slip the shell off just like a peel and eat shrimp, could not be easier.

Head-on and shell-on shrimp are not easy to find currently.

But as the inland shrimp farming industry grows, you're gonna be able to find shrimp like this that are incredibly fresh all across the country.

So cheers to inland shrimp farming.

If you are looking for this recipe and also some information on Vignole, just head to our website.

Thanks for joining me and I'll see you next time.

Connect with us online at wearetastemakers.com or through social media on these handles.

(energetic music) - [Narrator] Tastemakers is brought to you with support from Global Foods Market and Midwest Dairy.

(melodic closing music)