Lexington, KY - Compared to most commercial shellfish operations, 30-year-old Nat Henton's third-of-an-acre pond on his family farm near Versailles, where he grows Malaysian Giant freshwater prawns, is positively shrimpy.
Henton rounded up only about 500 pounds of the bluish, bug-eyed shrimp cousins during his annual harvest in mid-September.
That's an average take for him, he said, though it's only a fraction of the estimated 40,000 pounds of prawns harvested in Kentucky this year, according to the Kentucky State University aquaculture department.
Then again, that's only a tiny fraction of the estimated 1.5 million tons of farmed shrimp and prawns harvested and sold around the world each year.
But to Henton, 500 pounds of product was just about right, especially when he reflects on the relative simplicity of raising the prawns.
"I put them in the pond in late May when they were less than an inch long, and didn't have to do much but feed them once a day all summer," he said.
He didn't even have to look at them.
They stay on the bottom of the pond, "unless there's a problem,"
Henton said.
And since this year - like each of the nine years he's been raising prawns - was trouble free by his account, he didn't see his crop until he drained the 130,000-gallon spring-fed pond and waded into the residual muck to harvest it.
The next day Henton took his prawns, still alive in a water-filled tank on a flatbed truck, directly to customers at his one-day harvest festival, on the lawn at Midway's Holly Hill Inn.
Customers had the option of having their prawns beheaded and boiled Louisiana-style by Holly Hill staff on the spot, or they could take them home, bagged on ice, for $10 a pound head-on, or $15 a pound with heads removed. He sold about 110 pounds to individuals that day. The Holly Hill Inn bought another 115 pounds.
That left Henton with about 300 pounds of unsold live prawns at day's end, which in years past might have put him in an uncomfortable situation, he admitted.
Prawns don't stay happy for very long in storage tanks.
They are territorial beings who get along fine when everyone's got their spot on the murky floor of a pond, but get pretty stressed when virtually on top of one another in close quarters.
Henton knew this and more about them because of the ongoing research conducted by the aquaculture faculty at KSU in Frankfort, who've been working by legislative mandate for nearly a decade now to make prawn-farming and other kinds of marine-farming, successful and profitable ventures for Kentucky growers.
Henton buys his seed stock each spring from the the hatchery run by KSU, and has gotten advice over the years from department chair Jim Tidwell and marketing coordinator Angela Caporelli.
Handling and processing practices have figured heavily into that advice because that's where most of those who've tried raising prawns have encountered their worst problems, Caporelli said.
And I could relate.
Until gathering material for this column, I had tasted Kentucky-raised prawns only once, about five years ago, and the experience had been enough to keep me from giving them a second try.
I told Caporelli the frozen prawns I had tried had all the consistency of wet cardboard once they'd thawed, and the taste hadn't been much better.
She sighed.
"That's really unfortunate," she said. "But it wasn't the prawns; I can almost guarantee you that.
It was the handling and the packaging."
Especially in the early years, Caporelli said, growers weren't aware enough of the need to quickly separate the heads from the tails of prawns they intended to store for any length of time.
The heads almost instantly release enzymes that start breaking down the meat in the tail when prawns are killed, she said. Delay of even a couple of hours can harm the consistency of the tail meat. "And bad packaging can make it even worse. I saw lots of freezer burn in the early years."
Growers like Henton have listened and learned.
On the afternoon of his "Big Shrimpin'
Festival"
at Holly Hill, he said, with the help of his sister, Natalie, and his girlfriend, he would have all unsold prawns beheaded, deveined and packed by the next morning.
They would then go into freezer space available to him at Cleveland's - the Holly Hill Inn's sister restaurant in Versailles (he rents that space because he's sous chef at the Inn, in addition to his farming ventures).
The proof's in the tasting, of course, and I particularly wanted to compare Henton's prawns to those thawed monstrosities I recalled from years before, so I held off eating some fresh at the festival in favor of picking up a couple of frozen pounds a few days later.
And the difference was stark from the get-go.
The Kentucky prawns I tasted five years ago had rattled around loose in a plastic bag, several of them taking on extra little tailings of unappetizing frost from the freezer. Henton's shelled and deveined tails were, by contrast, compactly stacked to the very top of a 16-ounce plastic tub, allowing no room for freezer burn to set in.
Thawed, they had the firm, taut texture of shrimp, instead of the shrimp gelatin the earlier prawns became when thawed.
And Henton's prawns smelled, strongly, of honest-to-gosh seagoing protein - as though they'd come from the cleaner parts of the Gulf of Mexico rather than a pond just west of Millville.
Henton's 500-pound annual production of prawns is just a drop in an ocean of demand for seafood in central Kentucky, although he says it's enough for him.
He also makes money by raising and selling grass-fed beef, and by working at the Holly Hill Inn.
He says he has no plans to expand the size of his pond, or to dig more, or to try measures that might allow him more than one prawn harvest per year.
"I like to do things simply," he said.
"And I'm happy with what I've got." He adds that he's seen other producers encounter so many problems over the years, he's reluctant to mess with his own approach. "My pond doesn't leak, my prawns are healthy, and I've got an expanding group of customers who come to me when the time is right.
That's as much as I want to do right now, with everything else I'm doing on the farm."
Happily, he's not the only source.
KSU aquaculture marketing director Caporelli has assembled a list of the other Kentucky-based prawn producers who sell their product directly to consumers, at
www.ksuaquaculture.org.
And at least one of those purveyors, Susan Harkins, with Bubbasue Shrimp, is a fixture at the Lexington Farmers Market.
At an average of $15 per pound, the prawns these producers are offering may not seem a bargain compared to the farmed shrimp pretty regularly on sale at some of the bigger grocery stores for as little as $5 per pound.
But $5 shrimp shipped from Chile come freighted with hidden environmental and quality costs, and don't do a whole lot to support your local economy, and local farmers in particular.
So if you're looking only for bargains, don't tune into subsequent Kentucky Omnivore columns.
But if you want to learn more about the sometimes surprising and growing list of diverse foods raised and marketed here with local consumers in mind, this could be the spot to watch.
David Mudd is a freelance writer who lives in Anderson County.