Down on the (shrimp) farm: They're organic, planet-friendly and Florida-grown

BY LINDA BLADHOLM

Miami Herald Columnist

As the oceans are depleted, the future of seafood will likely lie in aquaculture. And the future of aquaculture may lie 90 miles from the nearest seashore amid the silver-plumed sugar-cane fields of south-central Florida. OceanBoy Farms is based on a 1,500-acre spread near LaBelle with a processing plant 25 miles east on the outskirts of Clewiston, a quiet sugar town near Lake Okeechobee. It's the nation's largest commercial producer of organic shrimp, and, according to one expert, the most advanced seafood-farming operation anywhere.

''OceanBoy is the biggest, baddest and meanest high-tech aquaculture farm in existence,'' says Carlos Martinez, an aquaculture expert with the University of Florida's Sea Grant marine extension program. ``They are a fantastic and responsible facility leading the way in aquaculture technology.''

The $55 million, privately held operation grew out of a master's thesis that founder David McMahon wrote a decade ago at the Nova Southeastern University's Oceanographic Center on the feasibility of raising ocean shrimp in fresh water. His goal was to find a way of eliminating the pollution generated by ocean-based shrimp farms and the by-catch waste caused by commercial shrimping.

OceanBoy -- a nickname McMahon picked up at Nova -- is based on two discoveries he made: First, though they can only reproduce in salt water, shrimp can be acclimated to fresh water. And second, this patch of Hendry County sits atop an aquifer whose water not only contains the minerals shrimp need to produce shells, but is slightly saline -- useless for crop irrigation but great for shrimp.

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