Imagine sitting down to a Valentine’s Day dinner of Missouri-farmed rainbow trout, freshly harvested and shipped overnight for the special day. Now visualize pairing the trout with Missouri-farmed shrimp.
Can’t quite picture Missouri freshwater shrimp? It was a novel concept for farmer Bill Crites, too, when he heard about it on an outing to a Cardinals baseball game. Little did he know the conversation would spawn a new business venture.
“We were at Busch Stadium when Scot told Billy about this shrimp-farming idea,” said Tyronza Pringle, who, with her husband, Scot, is a friend and financial partner to Crites and his wife, Theresa. Pringle continued, “I saw a newspaper article about locally grown freshwater shrimp.” She first thought shrimp farming might be just the thing to keep her and her children busy. “Of course, there’s a lot more to it than just feeding the shrimp in your pond a couple times a day,” Pringle said. “It’s really not something the kids and I could do in the back yard.”
“It was this crazy idea,” said Crites. With a little more investigation, however, it seemed plausible to harvest shrimp in Missouri. When the partners added trout to the mix, a year-round business plan took shape. So the Crites and the Pringles took “this crazy idea” to the banks, which is how their shrimp- and trout-farming business, The Storks, came to be. “We named our business as a play on words and ideas,” said Crites. “Scot is a gynecologist. And a stork is just about the last thing a fish farmer wants in a pond, so we said, ‘Let’s name it The Storks.'”
The two couples took farm-extension classes about fish farming. Crites made a weeklong field trip to a similar operation in Arkansas. He tried different varieties of shrimp and learned how to grow 3-day-old larval shrimp no bigger than a speck of pepper into 8-inch-long adult shrimp. He built special shrimp ponds at his Chaffee, Mo., farm. Crites farms shrimp in the warm months and rainbow trout in the cold months. “I’m rotation cropping,” Crites said.
The Storks debuted its premium products at the GreenMarket in the Central West End this past summer. During the winter months rainbow trout and frozen shrimp can be ordered over the phone directly from the farm (at 573.887.6859), and a Web site will be up and running soon. A minimum order of 5 pounds (of trout, shrimp or some of each) brings the seafood – packed in dry ice, of course – to your door the next day. Next summer, Crites plans to sell at the GreenMarket again.
You won’t find flash-frozen products at The Storks, because Crites doesn’t want to use nitrogen in the freezing process. His shrimp and trout are raised free of antibiotics and growth hormones. “I don’t want to eat that stuff,” Crites said. “My customers don’t want to either.”
Plus, he said, “I know what they’re fed from the cradle to the table, so to speak, and it’s all good.” He brings in special shrimp feed from Tennessee and uses a Purina mix for the rainbow trout. “Basically, I know their whole growth route. My shrimp aren’t pumped up with saline. My trout are high in protein, about 38 percent.
“I harvest only as much as I can process at any one time,” Crites continued. “You won’t find any mushy shrimp in my harvest.” Apparently, a mushy shrimp is prematurely dead shrimp, so firm is what you should look for. Crites explained the dead shrimp release an enzyme stored in their tails, which makes them mushy.
This may be a little too much information for some readers, but that’s what makes Crites a good farmer. He knows his shrimp and trout, head to tail. “Once you try our shrimp or trout,” he said, “you will taste the difference.”
This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2006.