Prawn Hatchery - Buying the baby Prawns

David48 · June 12, 2013

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Prawn Hatchery - Buying the baby Prawns ...

Yep ... another Prawn/Shrimp thread!

Packed, stacked and ready to be trucked.

Earlier this year I was very lucky to be invited by the Farm Family to visit with them a Prawn Hatchery ... the small scale commercial operation where they buy their stock from.

What did surprise me was the distance from the Farm this Hatchery was, considering the amount of ponds surrounding in the locale of just the Fish and Prawn Farm.

Maybe that's an opportunity for the future!

The production techniques, costs etc will come in the posts below and if you liked MissFarmGirl in the Prawn Interviews ... she makes a re-appearance with some information on the Hatchery and transporting the baby prawns etc.

Farm Mother inspecting the purchase ... MissFarmGirl yawning in the background.
Which is fair enough because we'd been up since sparrows fart, harvesting the prawns
before selling them to the wholesale market, then travelled the best part of an hour to arrive
at the Hatchery.

A small flavour of the trip to Hatchery. Lots more in the posts below.

Titanium Member

Advanced Members

6,000 posts

This also is my 6,000th Post and I like to celebrate that milestone in the Farming Forum.

The other in this series are ...

Prawn Harvesting 01

Wholesale Prawn Market

The Prawn Interviews

Prawn Harvesting 02

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Edited June 12, 2013 by David48

shaggy1969 · June 12, 2013

Congrats on another milestone David.

I am curious to know how the baby prawns are sold.

Are they weighed or just scooped and bagged with a fixed price and then left to the buyers discretion and choice?

David48 · June 12, 2013

Thanks shaggy1969 ... you simply get one 'spoon' per bag and pay per bag or, in this Farm's case 100 bags.

You can see that 'spoon' in the early secs of the Video above on in this photo below.

That photo is the only still I have of them working ... because ... gezze there were fast.

I have to confirm a little later to MissFarmGirl's interviews to approximately how many there are in each 'spoon' thus bag.

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David48 · June 12, 2013

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The growth baths ...

This Prawn Hatchery is located roughly an hour to 90 mins east or north-east of Bangkok.

They import either the eggs or the whole Female Prawn from seaside locations within Thailand and then proceed to grow them from eggs into a saleable product, which, from memory is about 1 -2 weeks old.

To my knowledge there is no hormone treatment to just have either male or female Prawns.

The prawns when sold are so tiny that there are a couple of thousand in each small plastic bag.

Scale of the operation

Dry pool

Shallow water only required.

The baby Prawns appear as 'dirt' on the pool's bottom

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Edited June 12, 2013 by David48

David48 · June 12, 2013

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Hatchery/Nursery Production of Prawn Fry

For those really keen and have a good internet connection.

From wo to go in the Phillipines

Probably one thing of note is the size of the Prawn that this video deals with is much larger then the common white Prawn the Farm grows out to Harvest.

The above Video was produced by SEAFDEC

The Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC) is an
autonomous inter-governmental body established in 1967. The mandate of
SEAFDEC as endorsed by the 41st Meeting of the SEAFDEC Council is "to
develop and manage the fisheries potential of the region by rational
utilization of the resources for providing food security and safety to
the people and alleviating poverty through transfer of new technologies,
research and information dissemination activities".

SEAFDEC comprises
11 Member Countries: Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, Lao
PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The Center operates through the Secretariat located in Thailand and has
four Technical Departments, namely: the Training Department; the Marine
Fisheries Research Department; the Aquaculture Department; and the
Marine Fishery Resources Development and Management Department.

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Edited June 12, 2013 by David48