Aquaculture News

Stick-Fins Farm is Featured in Florida Times-Union

Aquaculture - fish farming - is a thriving business for a couple of St. Johns County men

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By Roger Bull
Photos by JOHN PEMBERTON/The Times-Union
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Not too far from Whiteside's farm, just a couple of miles across Deep Creek Conservation Area, though it's a long drive around, Robinson is having a little tougher time with his crayfish. On Stick-Fin Farm, he raises red claw crayfish, a species native to Australia and far different from what the people in Louisiana call crawfish.

The ideal eating size of a red claw is about a quarter pound, Robinson said, though they'll grow bigger. They are not one-bite tails.

Paul Zajicek with the Florida Division of Aquaculture said there are no big crawfish farms in Florida like you see in Louisiana and East Texas. There was one a decade or so in Wewahitchka in the Panhandle, but that's closed. There was one in Woodbine, Ga., but that closed too, and this weekend's Woodbine Crawfish Festival had to truck a couple of tons of mudbugs in from Louisiana.

The two most common crawfish in Louisiana, red swamp and white river, are not legal east of the Apalachicola River because they aren't native and would compete with native species.

Robinson, who grew up on San Jose Boulevard in Jacksonville where Trad's Nursery sits now, worked on a fish farm in South Florida, came back north, worked construction and then started raising catfish on the side. But like pretty much all the catfish operations in Florida, that didn't make any money.

"They wanted to pay river prices," he said, "and I was growing farm-raised fish."

Nine years ago, he tried red claw crayfish. He sold the babies to other growers, often hobbyists, and was selling several hundred pounds a week to a seafood market in Jacksonville. But that market closed, and then he lost the lower half of his left leg to an infection.

He tried to get out of the business, but the person he leased it to pulled out.

Though he is trying to sell the land and business, he's back at work. He figures he'll raise a couple hundred thousand juveniles this year. He said he's got a couple of seafood distributors in Orlando who are ready to sell them when he's producing enough quarter-pounders. He's hoping for at least $10 a pound.

"Marketing hasn't ever been an issue," he said. "Growing them has. But we're learning more about it all the time."

roger.bull@jacksonville.com

 

Contact Stick-Fins Fish Farm for more information.