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Vol.III No.2 ARID LANDS FISH PRODUCTION Newsletter of U of Az and Az Aq Assoc. ARID LANDS FISH PRODUCTION This is our first On-Line effort. Please let us know what
you think. CRESCENT RESEARCH CHEMICALS He is a guy who is into this for something more than a buck. "I see aquaculture as one of the leading food resources of the 21st Century," Rothweiler says. "By the year 2030 there could be 10 billion people on earth. Food sources are dwindling and the burgeoning population is in the tropics, the mid-latitudes, not the northern hemisphere. So what I'm aiming at is warmwater culture of fish and crustacea." If this sounds like a government man wanting to do good, it is likely because Rothweiler used to be a government man who wanted to do good. An Arizonan since he was 12, he is sort of average-appearing--("He does not look like a submarine commander," one of his friends says with a grin, kidding us for describing Hyder fish farmer Mike Frimer as a bearded Sean Connery, "but he does look like a Navy chief, which he was, you know, in the Reserves.")--and educated in things environmental, with a Masters from ASU in 1975. "I saw pollution as a major problem," Rothweiler says, "something we really had to get a handle on, so I went into that kind of stuff. But the funding kept changing." He worked with water pollution; he was an urban planner for the City of Phoenix; he helped Kitt Peak on problems of outdoor light pollution, which bedevils astronomers; once he was even State Registrar for the National Register of Historic Places. Why the furniture store? "Just an interim thing," Rothweiler says. "For a little while, I wanted to get as far away from government technology as I could. I sure did." Crescent Research Chemicals was a declining business when Rothweiler took it over in 1986. Within three years, he had nearly tripled its sales. Crescent does what its name suggests: manufactures, packages and sells research chemicals, all over the world. For aquaculture, this means therapeutics, antibiotics, anesthetics, whatever. Major customers are fish hatcheries, aquaria, universities and federal agencies. Crescent is one of only a half-dozen major players in the game. The Food and Drug Administration controls medicines for aquaculture and more than one fish farmer is overwhelmed at the thought of having to deal with the FDA. Rothweiler is wary, of course, but he has the advantage of knowing how to speak government. "Even salt and ice are controlled if used as medicines," he says, "although they have low regulatory status." Only with a product approved by the FDA for aquaculture--of which there are few--can Rothweiler's company advise you; otherwise, if you want to know how to use a chemical, he will refer you to an aquatic biologist. In the past two years he has added two integrated companies: ChemLab Supply, which retails laboratory chemicals and apparatus across the U.S., mostly in Arizona, and Laboratory Specialties, which represents some major lab furniture and equipment lines in Arizona and New Mexico. Which leads us to the Crescent Aquaculture Group. With Rothweiler as chief, this is a bunch of experts he can call in to provide services in fish and shrimp culture, diagnostics and fish health, weed control, water quality, marketing and sales, business management, even site selection and appraisal. The aquaculture and marketing specialist is the well-known George Brooks Jr., who is also busy completing his PhD at The University of Arizona. Others include the UofA's Rod Williams, Aquaculture/Toxicology Specialist (Shrimp); Dr. Gail Todd, DVM, Disease Specialist (Finfish); Jeremy Jones, Chief Chemist; Ethan Schwartz, Business Brokering; Joe Hull, Real Estate Appraisal; Susan Hill, Project Budget Analysis; Wendy Piatkowski, Laboratory Planning; and David Perry, Public Relations and Advertising. They have a combined total of more than 30 years of practical aquaculture experience. "We started this to help develop Arizona aquaculture," Brooks says, "but we know that most of our work initially may have be outside the State." Crescent can be reached at 602-893-9234. Brooks adds that they are putting the final touches on a computer bulletin board, so that anyone with access to a PC and a modem can tie in, download the Crescent catalogue and get answers to questions. The Crescent Aquaculture Group bulletin board may turn out to be the Southwest's first fish farming stop on the Information Highway. But even if it helps provide the challenge Tom Rothweiler is still looking for, it will be kid stuff to his 16 year old son Karl, a laser hacker who is already into professional light shows. With two such males in the house, Janice Rothweiler probably gets a chance to catch her breath only when husband Tom, an outdoorsman when he has time for it, goes hiking on South Mountain. "Where we're trying to go with Crescent," he says earnestly, "is to get things started and find new products marketable for fish and shrimp growers. In bioremediation, the biological degradation of organic wastes, we're working on a proposal for a major project in Jamaica. We're assisting the Gila River Indian Reservation (MICA) with finfish planning, for the next phase at Pee Posh. For shrimp, we're looking at offshore locations in two different places, one in Mexico, as a place for export, the other in Viet Nam, to make high quality shrimp feed." His father, who was with a large chemical company in the Midwest, quit that job and brought his family to Arizona to start over. He bought a broom factory and when Rothweiler was growing up, he saw his father as an entrepreneur, which was not, in those days, universally regarded as a nice thing to be. "I had a sort of higher vision, I thought. I went into government to help people. Yet while government has a lot of good folks with good ideas, it lacks responsiveness. It was too slow for me. I figure I can make a bigger difference by being out of it." Rothweiler pauses. "I guess that makes me an entrepreneur, doesn't it?" CAPSULE - SUMMARIZINE THE USDA 1993 AQUACULTURE
SUMMARY Salmon and tilapia, however, are very much impacted by imports. Domestic farm production of Atlantic salmon, almost all from the states of Maine and Washington, increased 18% during 1993 to 26 million lbs. But at the same time, salmon imports went up 10% to 118 million lbs. U.S. salmon farming is limited by a shortage of suitable coldwater sites, which makes Walter Butler's long-range plans for Arizona's White Mountains (Arid Lands Fish Production Sep/Oct 1993) even more interesting. Salmon imports come mostly from Norway and Canada, but increasingly from Chile. (None of this involves the enormous frozen, wild-caught Pacific salmon market of 250 million lbs/year.) Tilapia data are even more dramatic: domestic tilapia farming increased 40% to 12.5 million lbs during 1993, but tilapia imports were more than twice that amount, soaring 90% to a live-weight equivalent of 33 million lbs. With tilapia, like salmon, domestic production is site-limited, but in mirror-image, requiring a warmwater environment, usually geothermal or recirculated. This is an advantage for growers in warm (to say the least) southwest Arizona. But U.S. producers find it difficult to compete with low-cost frozen imports from Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia, and fresh fillets imported from Costa Rica and Colombia. Domestic growers have tried to specialize more in the live-fish market, but this is inhibited by state laws restricting or even forbidding transport of live tilapia, supposedly to protect indigenous endangered fish. California is the worst example. Three chunks of good news for U.S. farmers are (1) the strengthening national economy improves the 1994 outlook for all fish and seafood products; (2) U.S. fish farmers continue to be indexed as making out better than their larger-scale counterparts in cattle, swine and poultry (Figure 3); and (3) increasing international restrictions on wild, offshore catches of all species are expected to reduce supplies and therefore increase the value of farmed products. Offshore catch restrictions increase the talk of developing new farm species. Norway is experimenting with halibut and cod, which interests New England; some sea-bass and bream are farmed in Western Europe; Hawaii still has hopes for mahi mahi; the U.S. continues to fund research in marine shrimp. The latter are perhaps the most popular American seafood, but unlikely to become a major crop here. More realistically, the U.S. may become the major, possibly the only, source of disease-free brookstock and post-larvae for the enormous shrimp farms of Asia and South America. EDITOR'S CORNER Do you really believe that the president of AquaFuture in Massachusetts and some others knowledgable about the trade are going to write letters to Time Magazine (in its April 25 issue) about "aquiculture," spelling it with an "i" instead of an "a?" Not hardly. What's happening, we suspect, is simply that some folks never give up. The U.S. settled comfortably on "aquaculture" some years back, but Time, noted for its large, omnipotent research department, went in the other direction. Obviously, Time is not about to be wrong: if they print it, they fix it. Technically, either spelling is correct, and let us avoid the semantic thickets where you trip over all those Latin and Old French roots. General usage has it "aquaculture." But if some lexicographers prefer the archaic "aquiculture," let them. The important thing is that they buy the fish farmer's product. So long as they do that, we should give them leave to spell it however they wish. Editor: Wayne Collins |