Shrimp don’t have eyelids, so when Nolan Wellensiek turns off the lights in his repurposed machinery shed outside Cook, the sudden change prompts them to flip to escape what they perceive to be a predator. He often has to walk around his 15,000-gallon tank, cellphone flashlight in hand, to retrieve the shrimp that jumped out.
Wellensiek has been raising Pacific white shrimp since he was a junior in high school. Now a freshman at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the 19-year-old sells his fresh shrimp directly to customers every summer.
The demand for his shrimp has been so high, he said, that he can’t always guarantee he’ll have enough to sell to everyone who wants to buy from him.
Wellensiek’s business, Big Red Shrimp Co., is one of only two private aquaculture facilities currently licensed in the state to raise white saltwater shrimp.
Wellensiek said his business has been profitable. A huge benefit to shrimp, he said, is their efficient feed conversion ratio — the ratio of the feed they consume to the weight they gain in return. Large animals like cattle tend to have a less-efficient ratio, ranging from around 4 to 7 pounds of feed for every pound of live weight gain. Shrimp’s ratio is closer to one to one.
Yet the infrastructure for land-based aquaculture is expensive, and startup costs are high. Cold Midwest weather does its shrimp (and fish) farmers no favors — they have to pay to power indoor systems, often with little to no external funding or support. Shrimp water tanks are like high-tech, heated aquariums. It can be difficult to maintain a consistent environment to keep the animals alive. And without outside financial help, the risks are especially steep.
Each season, Wellensiek has 15,000 baby shrimp shipped to Omaha’s Eppley Airfield from a Florida hatchery. Then, on his farm about an hour south of Omaha, he raises them in a nursery tank for 30 days before transferring them to the larger recirculating water tank.
The air inside the shrimp shed feels hot and muggy, comparable to a midsummer day in Nebraska, Wellensiek said.
In season, he has to check on his shrimp twice a day, often as early as 5 a.m., to ensure the quality of the water they grow in. At the start, he said, shrimp are “so small and so fragile.” Wellensiek must monitor their water frequently for the proper levels of such things as salt content, acidity, temperature and oxygen. If any levels are off, the shrimp could die.
From purchase to market, the whole process takes about 120 days. But despite the end profitability, “the work it takes is a pain,” Wellensiek said. “It has to be the right person that’s willing to put the time in to make (their business) grow.”
When Wellensiek started Big Red Shrimp Co., he received a loan of about $10,000 from his parents — as well as help from Dietrich Brinegar, who sold his old equipment to Wellensiek at a reduced price.
Brinegar felt confident when he started Nebraska Shrimp Co. in 2017. But he closed down the business around 2022 after a host of issues.
The main one was securing a steady supply of baby shrimp, which became especially difficult due to hurricanes that damaged hatcheries and the coronavirus pandemic. “I was so worried about demand, and I should have been worried about supply,” he said. “Demand was never a problem.”
Brinegar originally thought he could start big and learn about shrimp farming as he went. But now he recommends that anyone looking to break into the industry start small and become an expert first.
“The other struggle I had was actually keeping those babies alive … It’s too risky of a business to throw someone in there expecting them to learn the technicalities of aquaculture,” he said.
The obstacles Brinegar faced are common in aquaculture. When he started out, Brinegar said most of his support came from the expertise of other shrimp farmers in the region.
Brinegar currently runs a row crop operation in Carleton with his dad. In retrospect, he said, he would have dedicated more of his time to traditional agriculture from the start, “where the actual safer bets are,” rather than taking the leap into shrimp farming.
“My projections were it’s a gold mine, and it is if you can do everything perfect. But there’s really no fail safes, either,” he said. “You make a mistake, and those shrimp die. You have to replace them. There’s no government subsidies. There’s no really affordable insurance policies. There’s nothing. It’s a risk.”
Of the 17 private aquaculturists currently licensed in the state, most work on the recreational side, running fish hatcheries or farms to stock bodies of water. Only a couple, like Wellensiek, sell their products to local consumers.
Dwindling interest
The Nebraska Aquaculture Board was created in 1993 to promote education, industry voices and regulatory advice on aquaculture. Yet the board hasn’t held a meeting in years and is set to terminate in July.
William Murray, the last board president, said the decline of aquaculture in Nebraska, both on the recreational and consumer side, led to the board’s decline.
“The interest really had dwindled, which is sad, because we do need a voice, especially in the regulatory environment,” Murray said.
Murray also serves as the state representative for the North Central Regional Aquaculture Center, one of five centers funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to support aquaculture research and development.
A 2023 report from the National Aquaculture Association said the program supporting these regional centers is “woefully and dramatically underfunded.”
Cole Schelkopf, a Nebraska fish farmer, took over the family business, Blue Valley Aquaculture, in 2017. His dad and uncle had established it in 1999.
Now, Schelkopf raises close to 100,000 freshwater trout — mostly rainbow trout — in a large converted hog barn near Sutton, about 30 miles east of Hastings. The fish grow in flowing, 54-degree water systems inside concrete tanks and channels, many of which used to be old manure pits.
Today, Schelkopf sells his trout for stocking, but back around 2007, an Omaha chef had called the business inquiring about fresh fish for his menu.
That inspired years of Blue Valley Aquaculture selling steelhead trout to restaurants around Omaha and Lincoln, as well as processing its own frozen fish filets for sale. That continued until the coronavirus pandemic shut down restaurants in 2020. The consumer base for Schelkopf’s fish was gone.
By pivoting to the recreational market full time in 2022, Schelkopf was able to stay in business. But he doesn’t understate the risks in his line of work.
“You get quite a bit wrapped up and invested in these fish, and if something goes wrong, you can lose a lot really fast,” he said.
Aquaculture is the fastest-growing agriculture sector in the world, yet it’s declining in the U.S., said Lauren Stigers, a Michigan-based expert who holds a doctorate in fisheries and allied aquacultures.
The industry is highly regulated in the U.S. and involves many different agencies, Stigers said, which can make compliance costly and confusing. American farmers struggle to compete with imported seafood, which tends to be cheaper. But local farmers advocate for the quality of their product, noting its absence of preservatives and additives compared to imports.
According to the most recent fisheries report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), around 75% to 90% of seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported.
Kwamena Quagrainie, an aquaculture marketing director and professor at Purdue University, said customers often prefer fresh, local seafood, but many are still unwilling to pay prices high enough to cover a farmer’s production costs. Another big challenge: The lack of government assistance.
While almost every agriculture industry receives forms of federal subsidies, funding for local aquaculture can seem hard to justify, said Donald Schreiner of Minnesota Sea Grant, which leads the Great Lakes Aquaculture Collaborative. (Correction: This article incorrectly described Minnesota Sea Grant. It is a state program, not an advisory group.)
“Probably because it’s new, probably because people don’t understand it, and to be honest, there are a lot of failures out there,” he said. “It’s like, you know, ‘We’re not going to invest a bunch of money in an industry that’s tiny and may or may not grow.’ But at some point, somebody is going to have to take a chance on it.”
NOAA offers a handful of loans and competitive grants for aquaculture, though many are focused on marine aquaculture and fisheries. Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded $1.7 million to support domestic aquaculture research, citing the need to lower the country’s seafood trade deficit and expand its food security, job and export market.
In Nebraska’s southwest corner, Grant Jones — another of Nebraska’s licensed shrimp farmers — started Chundy Aquaculture in 2020 out of a repurposed machine shed.
His Pacific white shrimp are flown into Denver from nurseries in Florida or Texas. Jones has spent many long nights driving the almost seven-hour round trip to Denver to get the shrimp back to his farm and acclimated to their new environment. He raises them indoors in eight 14-foot tanks filled with heated, recirculating water.
Jones, a sixth-generation farmer who also helps run his family’s cattle farm and seed stock operation, said he was denied multiple loans when starting Chundy Aquaculture before he received a small loan for young farmers.
Like Wellensiek, Jones sells his shrimp directly to consumers. He said he’d love to expand to restaurants, but maintaining a consistent supply of shrimp on that level is difficult.
“Blazing this trail that I have gotten on has been a lot tougher than I thought it would be,” Jones said. “We’re trying to get customers used to a different product. We’re trying to sell it for twice as much as you can buy it at Walmart, right? But it is a completely different product … it’s quality. You’re buying something that even if we freeze it, it’s within days old.”
Jones originally ran the shrimp farm full time, but he’s currently taking a break from operations with hopes to approach it differently in the future. He said he’s considered scaling up the business or working with fish.
“Even though I’m taking a pause, I don’t feel like I’ve totally failed yet,” Jones said. He knows that aquaculture is tough, but he’s not ready to give up on an industry where he sees a future.
“There’s a lot of days that I beat my head against the wall and wonder why I do it,” he said. “But yet at the same time, I’ll come back the next day and I’m ready to go again.”
