Americans eat about 4 billion pounds of seafood a year, but many of us don’t know where our fish or shellfish come from—or even what we’re eating. (Seafood is sometimes intentionally mislabeled.) Karlanea Brown’s family-run shrimp farm, in landlocked Indiana, offers a cheaper, sustainable, and more transparent approach.
For years, the Brown family had raised hogs but became frustrated by plummeting prices in the market. So they began looking into aquaculture. In 2010, they decided to raise shrimp. Their farm, RDM Aquaculture, is now the largest such operation in Indiana—which is a U.S. leader in inland shrimp farming—and produces 250,000 shrimp a month.
Today, much of the world’s shrimp is grown in small farms in Southeast Asia that don’t always measure up to U.S. health-safety regulations. In 2011, the Government Accountability Office cited several examples of imported samples tainted with unregulated antibiotics. Farms like Brown’s provide a safe and healthier alternative.
To read the rest of the story, please go to: Popular Science
