Becky Bruns stands next to new equipment she installed this past summer at her Shrimp Shack business in rural Danube. Carolyn Lange / West Central Tribune
Shrimp is a jumbo business in west central Minnesota BY CAROLYN LANGE West Central Tribune
WILLMAR — A unique working relationship between a former dairy farmer from Blomkest, two former poultry farmers from Danube and a hightech engineering company in Willmar could produce the first commercial-scale saltwater shrimp to be born, raised and processed in Minnesota. There are some moving pieces to the puzzle to fit together yet, but the picture looks promising. “Everyone’s watching to see what happens,” said Becky Bruns, who is nearly done upgrading equipment at her farmraised shrimp business, Shrimp Shop, in rural Danube. “We’re just having fun,” said Paul Damhof, who started growing and selling shrimp in his converted dairy barn in 2017 at his wildly successful business, Simply Shrimp. Although it’s been shut down since COVID, Damhof is planning to build a new shrimp-growing operation next year and intends to install equipment recently developed by Nova-Tech
Engineering in Willmar that can remove the veins, heads, legs and shells from fresh, market-ready shrimp. But Damhof is also knee-deep in research with his business partner, Barb Frank, to breed shrimp and sell the babies to shrimp farmers around the globe to help meet a growing demand for 21-dayold baby shrimp that farmers raise to market weight. To make things more interesting, Barb Frank is Becky Brun’s mother. The two raised commercial poultry for 40 years before the 2015 avian influenza pandemic knocked the wind out of their business and they looked for new options in agriculture. Bruns now operates the Shrimp Shop, and Frank teamed up with Damhof to create the shrimp hatchery, called Minnesota Shrimp, which is on the cusp of becoming operational with the capacity to produce at least 100 million baby shrimp every year. Frank thinks it’s closer to 200 million.
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If all goes well, the shrimp hatched in Blomkest will not only be raised at the Shrimp Shop and Simply Shrimp but at shrimp farms all over the United States and Canada and beyond. And — if all goes according to plan — equipment developed by Nova-Tech will be used to process shrimp raised in Minnesota and around the world. Nova-Tech CEO Jim Sieben said the ShrimpWorks equipment, which uses patented, automated technology to process fresh shrimp, will be marketed to shrimp farms worldwide — much like Nova-Tech’s equipment that’s used in 600 poultry hatcheries in 58 countries on six continents. This type of ingenuity, imagination, hard work, partnerships and willingness to take risks could put land-locked west central Minnesota on the saltwater shrimp map. The fact that this is happening amid corn, soybean and traditional livestock farms absolutely thrills Damhof.
