Discoveries
AS A BLUEPRINT FOR BETTER BUSINESS
MSU ingenuity aimed to shore up U.S. aquaculture industry By Vanessa Beeson, Photos by Beth Wynn
M
ississippi State has long been a big fish in aquaculture economics research, trawling the waters of opportunity to help improve profit and productivity. As home to the Thad Cochran National Warmwater Aquaculture Center—the nation’s largest aquaculture research facility—MSU is invested in boosting not only catfish productivity but the whole U.S. aquaculture industry.
Mississippi’s Fresh Catch
As the country’s largest catfish producer, Mississippi accounted for $226 million of the United States’ overall $370 million production value in 2020—proving the strength of a statewide industry that’s been building for more than 50 years.
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Mississippi’s commercial catfish industry began in the 1960s and by the 1980s was well on its way to positioning catfish as a staple on America’s dinner plate. Along the way, MSU helped develop the tools and innovations catfish producers needed to grow and thrive— from establishing enterprise budgets to researching improved production practices to studying nutrition, diseases and more. The industry continued to grow through the 1990s until the mid-2000s when it began to feel a squeeze, driven in part by low-priced and low-quality imported pangasius catfish flooding the U.S. market. The contraction forced catfish farmers to concentrate more on maximizing profit and production efficiency. Jimmy Avery, an Extension professor and director of the NWAC Southern Regional Aquaculture Center, explained that MSU-
driven research helped catfish producers pivot their production models by focusing on economics, production practices and systems, nutrition, water quality, fish health management, genetics and breeding. “One response to competition from foreign supplies of catfish-like products is to create more intensive systems that increase efficiency and, hopefully, decrease production costs,” Avery said. “Research on more intensive systems was conducted by NWAC and USDA Agriculture Research Service scientists, and farmers began adopting these systems. Their continuous use combined with the complementary use of hybrid catfish in these systems, are the principal reasons we have been able to increase per-acre yields from 4,000 pounds per acre to 6,800 pounds per acre.”
