fishing planet catfish heaven leader length

This is why Jose Villalon and WWF are here in Vietnam working with big producers like Minh. Forests and wetlands get bulldozed into new ponds.

Intensive systems like this can feed a lot of people, but there’s also the potential for things to go terribly wrong.

“This is going to be how the future will receive its marine protein.” “When you look at ponds like this and you see the production output of them and you see how the fish are feeding efficiently,” Villalon said. And, unlike carnivorous fish like salmon, it thrives on a mostly vegetarian diet. It can breathe air through its mouth if things get too crowded. Jose Villalon, who heads the World Wildlife Fund’s aquaculture program, says pangasius may be the perfect factory fish. “I think in the future, farmed fish such as pangasius will take a special role in supplying food for the world, especially as wild fish continue to decline,” he said.Īnd he’s not the only one who thinks so. This year he expects to produce 200,000 tons of frozen fish fillets, most of which will be sold as catfish in Europe and the U.S.īut for Minh, that legacy he speaks of, is about more than just numbers.

Minh also owns his entire supply chain, from the feed mill all the way to processing and packaging. Today his pangasius farm, called Hung Vuong Corporation, is Vietnam’s largest, with nearly two square miles of ponds. In a single decade, Minh has built an aquaculture empire. “And the legacy I want to leave for the future generations is the development of this aquaculture business.” “For me this is about legacy,” Mihn said. And entrepreneurs like fifty six year old Duong Ngoc Minh are the new tycoons. The surface of the pond explodes with fish so dense it looks like you can walk across them.įortunes are being made raising these native catfish, called pangasius, on an industrial scale. Workers bang the floorboards on a raft and then pour 50-pound bags of commercial fish pellets - which consist mostly of imported soy meal - into the water. Cut to the scene at feeding time at a catfish farm in the Mekong River Delta. Today’s model couldn’t be more different. The farmers then drained the ponds and fertilized their fields with the sludge before starting the cycle all over again, never buying a single bag of feed or fertilizer. The small ponds were integrated into family farms where fish fed on agricultural waste until they became food themselves. In the 1960’s Vietnam’s late communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, encouraged the rural poor to dig fishponds as a way to boost their nutrition.

Fishing planet catfish heaven leader length