Healthy (Saudi) prawns are happy prawns
Published: Jun 2, 2010 10:05 Updated: Jun 2, 2010 10:12
As flaky ideas go, “Let’s open a prawn farm about five times the size of Bermuda in the desert” has to be, at first sight, one of the flakiest. However, to prawn-passionate engineer, Ahmad R. Al Balla, the idea simply abounded with possibilities 28 years ago.
The result today after about a decade in production is one of the biggest integrated prawn farms in the world: The National Prawn Company. It delivers nearly 15,000 tons of the very best quality prawns annually to markets both in the Kingdom and across the world. So good are they that they are Saudi Arabia’s second biggest export to Japan after oil. In fact, the company won the first EU license to export all its prawns in 2005. Even more, by the end of 2012, a second phase of development should be completed with the potential to increase production to 43,000 tons a year.
Not quite such a flaky idea after all, it seems.
To resolve the apparent oxymoron of a desert prawn farm takes a visit to the National Prawn Company’s huge spread of coastal breeding and production ponds just north of Al-Lith.
It is a desolate looking location — but therein lays one of the underpinning strengths of the operation. It is built on a determination to minimize its impact on the environment. If the virtually sterile saline salt-marsh (sabkah) environment is incapable of sustaining any plant life and no animals — apart from the occasional transient snake — then there is not much damage to be done in the first place.
Add to that a commitment to sustainability and to producing prawns without any antibiotics or chemical additives at all by relying entirely on the perfect cleanliness of your water and feed, a customized growing program together with rigorously observed bio-security measures, and you have a facility that produces healthy and happy prawns. You can actually tell by the prawns’ color: Stressed prawns tend to be redder.
As to the healthy consumer, they far exceed the tough health standards for fresh prawns required by UK and US food regulations by being only a 16th of the way to the acceptable maximum safety levels for human consumption. As a result, they are probably the healthiest prawns — the white prawn penaeus indicus being the species in question — on the planet. All this is achieved through careful management of the growing environment and maintenance of the facility without an antibiotic or chemical in sight.
“The question has always been whether we could build this long term and make it the lynch pin of a new aquaculture industry in the Kingdom,” said Laurence Cook, Communications Director for the company. “The answer is ‘yes’ because from the start, it was engineered to ensure that it could be built quickly and maintained with the minimum of cost at all levels.”
“The 12 farms we have now with roughly 28 ten-hectare ponds allows us to have a low-density population of prawns: About 18 per square meter,” he said. This was much lower density than normal in the industry but the large pond size allowed the production of commercial quantities. From the outset it also greatly reduced the potential for disease.
NPC’s Al-Lith site is a small community in its own right with over 2,500 employees. Onsite is a 21.6 MW power station, feed mill, road building and maintenance, community services, recreational facilities, polyclinic and an international school for employees’ families.
It takes a continuous on-site hatchery program that produces four million young a day — soon to be increased to eight million for the planned expansion — to supply the throughput of prawns.
The growing ponds are filled with water lifted from deep in the Red Sea — about a kilometer and a half off shore. It enters a feeder canal where it connects with the ponds, circulating through on a five-day cycle. The prawns are fed with food made in the company’s own mill and the waste from the prawn pond flows out with the circulating water, but not before it gets cleaned up very considerably.
The exiting water first flows into an environmental treatment pond where waste settles leaving the water that is drained off into the sea cleaner by far than required by international environmental standards.
True to the core ethic of sustainability, the company has a pilot scheme under way to use one of nature’s cleaners to remove the waste: The sea cucumber. It’s not much to look at and lives possibly the dullest life of any animal, but the sea cucumbers — thousands of them — lie quietly in the treatment pond and eat waste. Water goes back into the sea as clean water that far exceeds national and international standards.
When they get big enough the sea cucumbers will be removed, dried and sold to the Far East market at anything up to $150 a kilo. A replacement army of five million cucumber cleaners — currently being bred on-site especially for the purpose — will supply replacement stock.
The company is experimenting with new products and methodologies to maximize commercial gain yet reduce even more their environmental impact. One neat idea is a project to grow rather unattractive green and red algae, slime when wet but when dry a “nutraceutical”, a cross between nutrient and pharmaceutical.
It is actually quite difficult to stop the stuff growing, but the National Prawn Company has applied some lateral thinking to this. The experimental biomass generators — plastic tubes of growing algae — have air bubbling through them. However, growth increases with carbon dioxide as the feeder gas. It is theoretically possible to locate the algae farm next to a high CO2 producer and use the waste gas to grow algae that is absorbed and turned into a valuable food supplement or medicine.
“We do these pieces of research stage by stage,” said Cook. “Once that is proven, we scale it up to see if it could be commercially viable.” Once more, the system relies on using what is in the environment and processing it in such a way that it reduces impact, produces a saleable product and is commercially attractive.
This is one of the keys to the whole operation; sustainable commercial viability achieved through applying sound environmental practice in such a way that it makes money. If “green” makes a company a profit — and it takes some imagination, sound science and huge attention to detail to achieve that — then there is no reason NOT to be green.
The other is integration. The entire process from brood-stock breeding through production to dispatch is integrated into one logistics chain on the site.
For now and the foreseeable future, prawns are the central business and freshness, the key selling point. Gathered from the ponds at night and transported in sea-ice at -4 C they are in the clinically clean and rigidly controlled bio-security area of the processing plant minutes later. Fewer than two hours after gathering, they are chilled and processed. Fewer than seven hours sees them packed and frozen to between -18 C to -20 C.
This compares with fishing boats gathering wild prawns of unknown quality and health, perhaps needing 48 hours, or in the case of arctic prawns even days, to get them from gathering point to processing plant.
Most of the production consists of whole head-on prawns. Some though are decapitated — but even the heads are not wasted
Prawn heads contain a valuable substance: Chitin. Ancillary to the main plant, a unit cleans, dries and mills the raw material, extracting the polysaccharide chitin in the process. It has numerous uses: Purifying wastewater, thickening and stabilizing foods and pharmaceuticals, sizing and strengthening paper, as a wound-healing agent, a treatment for arthritis, and a binder for dyes, fabrics, and adhesives.
All from a humble, but exceedingly happy and healthy prawn.
National Prawn Company is one of the biggest integrated prawn farms in the world and delivers nearly 15,000 tons of the very best quality prawns annually to markets both in the Kingdom and across the world.
Comments
SUHAIL
Jun 3, 2010 09:37
Report abuseN. FRANK/JEDDAH
Jun 3, 2010 16:08
Report abuseAs far as my knowledge goes, prawns, are a good source of income as a commercial activity, and may be good for the taste buds, but as far as health benefits are concerned, there may not be any.
MOMEEN
Jun 3, 2010 19:56
Report abuseMANICAM
Jun 3, 2010 19:58
Report abuseBravo! on a great vision and successful implementation. of a fine, grand and impressive project. Shabas!
PATRICK WOOD
Jun 17, 2010 20:25
Report abusePatrick Wood