Midland Co. farms Pacific white shrimp, also known as King prawn, which is normally native to the Pacific coasts along Mexico to southern Peru. Because of the distance, much of the stuff you find in Iowa grocery stores is frozen. Midland Co. hopes to offer a fresher alternative. (Photo: Gineesh Madapparambath)
By Lisa Rossi
The shrimp are jumpy.
It’s the middle of a spring day, cold outside with snow on the ground but warm and humid in an indoor shrimp farm in Hampton, about 90 minutes north of Des Moines. One little critter jumped out of its tank. It wiggled and thrashed on the ground until a visitor wrestled it into submission with two hands and plopped it back in the tank.
Welcome to a sustainable indoor shrimp farm in rural Iowa, where innovation just might reshape the state’s agricultural future.
The tanks usually have covers but one was peeled back for the benefit of visitors. “We have the covers to help the humidity in here, but it’s also to keep the shrimp from jumping,” said Jackson Kimle, 30, the founder and president of the sustainable shrimp farming startup known as Midland Co. “When you stick a net in that tank, they can jump very far — like, 15 feet.”
Kimle founded Midland in 2018 in Ames to sell farmers the technology they need to raise shrimp indoors. A full module costs $200,000; half modules are less. Kimle said farmers often pay an additional $50,000 to $100,000 in building infrastructure costs to get started. Midland offers ongoing training and support and even helps farmers find markets for the shrimp they produce, in exchange for a percentage of those sales.
So far, Midland has set up three operations in Iowa — in Hampton as well as Redfield and Washington. It is raising capital to bring on more farms, develop intellectual property, increase grower support and accelerate the time it takes to build the farming systems. Investors include Ag Startup Engine, Ag Ventures Alliance and InnoVenture Iowa, along with farmers, business owners and angel investors.
The idea struck Kimle while he was working from 2016 to 2018 with another startup called Inland Sea, an indoor salmon farming project that imported technology from Europe. It never found a permanent home, but its proposed location was Harlan, Iowa.
And it made Kimle wonder: “Can we build our own and lean into innovative technology and concepts that are approachable for farmers, where they can diversify and get involved?”
Over the next 20 years, he hopes Midland can help build a billion-dollar aquaculture industry in Iowa. “We import enough shrimp and fish,” he said. “There’s plenty of market need.”
Farming shrimp, Iowa-style
Ken Reed is one of the Iowans who’ve taken the plunge into shrimp farming. He got out of hog production two years ago, and currently farms corn and soybeans in Washington, Iowa.
He installed the Midland setup in an old unit he once used for sows and received his first shrimp from the hatchery in March.
Despite some initial worries, he said the shrimp are “actually pretty darn simple.” He talks with Kimle at least every week and knows he can call him if any problems pop up. He expects the operation to be profitable in four years.
Reed said his neighbors in Washington County, which is known for farming pigs, seem curious about the new kind of farming. “It’s creating a lot of interest,” he said. “It’s just something so different.”
Brian Waddingham, the executive director of the Coalition to Support Iowa’s Farmers, said shrimp farms and aquaculture in general could help Iowa’s rural economy, as operators convert old hog barns or old schools into indoor fisheries.
“If you can put a shrimp farm in a small rural community and get a good customer base growing, that’s going to bring people into that community,” he said. “If you’ve got restaurants or gas stations, they’ll get utilized a little bit more. So, yeah, I think, looking long term, it could have a definite positive economic impact here in the state of Iowa.”
Clean water, cleaner shrimp
What makes Kimle’s shrimp farming operation unique is the algae-based water treatment technology he developed with Midland Co. Chief Technical Officer Matt Ellis. It captures and removes the nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon dioxide that the shrimp excrete.
“As the algae grows, it is actually doing photosynthesis,” Kimle explained. “It takes in CO2 and respires O2 just like any plant.”
The shrimp eat the algae. Then, the excess algae and waste are removed by a filter and can be applied to traditional cropland as a regenerative fertilizer.
The water is also recycled. The Hampton facility uses 13,000 gallons of water, of which only 10 gallons are lost a day. As Kimle explained, “We use mechanical filtration to remove solids, the algae removes dissolved waste, and then we have a third process that helps us remove small particles in the water.”
Locally grown shrimp benefits consumers, too, said Waddingham, with the farmers’ coalition. He estimates that only 2% of U.S. fish and shrimp imports are inspected, and the average time that fish and shrimp spend on a boat is 10 days.
“So just by buying local here in Iowa, the freshness of that product is going to be a real game-changer for consumers, especially those consumers that you know are accustomed to eating shrimp and fish,” he said. “This is just going to provide a much better eating experience.”
A premium product with room to grow
The Hampton facility is tight. There’s just barely enough room for visitors to squeeze around the shrimp tanks. One tank is a nursery, where tiny little wisps of baby shrimp, sourced from a hatchery in Minnesota, bop around the saltwater. Next is the tank for larger shrimp, where some gather near the top in a small group, not unlike the human group coming to observe them.
The shrimp have a slight blue hue. Kimle pointed out their long antennae and their lack of missing legs or lesions, unlike their counterparts that are caught in the wild. He estimates a 12-ounce package of the farmed shrimp could cost around $20, at the upper end of the market.
“That’s a premium meat spot,” he said, comparing the product to prime cuts of beef like ribeyes, filets and T-bones.
Obviously, the shrimp industry in landlocked Iowa is still in its early stages, more for an upscale market than the masses. But as with other products, current innovation could expand access for bigger markets in the future. After all, even a staple like celery was once a delicacy in the late 1800s, until farmers developed hardier varieties for more diverse climates.
Kimle expects shrimp production costs to drop over the next 15 to 20 years as technology becomes more efficient. It’s still a recent phenomenon, he said, but “the volumes have grown pretty rapidly.”
The Hampton farm can produce up to 3 tons of shrimp a year, or 6,000 pounds. Soon, Midland plans to build a few bigger facilities that can produce up to 6 tons or even 9 tons of shrimp each year.
Currently, most of the shrimp and seafood that Americans eat is imported, according to the Southern Shrimp Alliance, a group of shrimp fishermen, processors and other members of the domestic industry in the eight warmwater states that produce shrimp.
So far, three Iowa retailers sell Midland-farmed shrimp: West Forty Market in Ankeny, Fire & Salt in Corning and Wheatsfield Co-opin Ames.
