Feed costs forcing catfish farmers to drain ponds

Catfish farmers are draining their farms because of increasing corn and soybean feed costs, writes David Streitfeld for The New York Times. "It's a dead business," says John Dillard, who pioneered the industry in the late 1960s. (Photo by James Patterson for The Times.) "Perhaps nowhere has the rise in crop prices caused more convulsions than in the Mississippi Delta, the hub of the nation’s catfish industry," Streitfeld writes. "This is a hard-luck, poverty-plagued region, and raising catfish in artificial ponds was one of the few mainstays."

Feed prices have nearly tripled in the last two years, "creating a bonanza for corn and soybean farmers but ... wrecking havoc on consumers, who are seeing price spikes in the grocery stores and in restaurants," Streitfeld writes. Feed has become more than half the total cost associated with raising catfish. Dillard & Co. raised 11 million fish last year but will raise none next year; President Keith King estimated his company only got back 75 cents for every dollar it spendt raising catfish. Delta Farm Press reported May catfish-feed deliveries in the U.S. were down 23 percent from May 2007.

Some catfish farmers recently moved to gluten-based feed, which is a cheaper derivative of corn, to lessen costs, but transportation costs and prices were negatively effected by the Midwest floods. "The industry is going to implode," says Dick Stevens, president of Consolidated Catfish, whose company is resorting to layoffs including 100 last month and another 200 cuts in the near future. Stevens blames government ethanol mandates for fuel production that compete with food for harvest.

Catfish farming, a $462 million industry in 2005, according to the Agriculture Department, employed 10,000 people at its peak, mostly in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Arkansas. The domestic market was flooded by Vietnamese and Chinese producers, which resulted in a ceiling on prices and accelerated the industry's decline. "I've been doing this for 23 years," says Craig Morgan, a catfish farm worker. "I don't know what I'll do now. And there are bunch of me's out there." Read more here.