On-Farm challenges 

Below are the top six most common complaints from farmers in the six countries. These highlight the main challenges that limit the growth and harvest of farms.

Over all disease is the top challenge faced by farmers as they struggle to prevent pathogens from entering ponds. Pathogens infect shrimp and cause high mortality and/or inhibit growth. Environmental control is the next highest challenge. Farmers are unable to properly manage the physical, biological, and chemical conditions in outdoor ponds due many factors which include daily and seasonal climate fluctuations. 

If farmers experience high shrimp mortalities and slow growth early on in the production cycle, many attribute the problem to hatcheries that supply poor quality of post-larvae instead of looking for other contributing factors on their own farms. Another issue is the supply of post-larvae from hatcheries is their delay in availability which can cause problems on farms if they do not arrive on time for stocking. Farmers spend extra effort, time, and money to create phytoplankton blooms that prepare the water for stocking. If post-larvae arrive late, the blooms may have already crashed, thereby resulting in nutrient deficient water for post-larvae to grow in.  

Access to capital for smaller farms is a major issue that shortens the lifespan of resident farmers. Prior to stocking ponds, farmers need capital to invest in pond preparation and to purchase post-larvae, feed, and other operational expenses. In most cases, they will use the profits from previous crops to pay for the next crop even if farmers have poor survival rates or poor farm gate prices after a crop. In these cases, farmers cannot afford to pay themselves nor can they easily acquire financial loans to prepare the next crop. 

Other major challenges are access to clean uncontaminated water, limited electricity, and high production costs such as feed and electricity, which make up between 45 to 55% and 15 to 30% respectively. 

From a technology perspective, the cost and efficiency of aeration using unreliable sources of power is a common problem for farmers. If farmers cannot turn aerators back on fast enough during a power outage, the shrimp lose access to sufficient levels of oxygen and become stressed. Power outages in the night time tend to have slower reaction times by staff. Farmers state that even a 10 to 20 minute power outage result in dead shrimp the following morning.

On-farm wish list

We asked farmers what they would spend their money on if they had extra revenue or investment. Below is a summary of the top six most common requests in each country.