Catfish: A farming success story

By Mark Schleifstein,
Staff writer

BELZONI, Miss.

Soybeans were selling for about $2.50 a bushel in 1966, not really enough to make plowing a couple hundred acres of buckshot clay soil worthwhile.
  So Tom Reed III took a roundabout trip to visit agricultural extension agents in Auburn, Ala., and Stuttgart, Ark., to talk about an odd alternative he’d been reading about: catfish.
  When he got back to Belzoni, Reed created a few small ponds and stocked them with catfish. In 18 months, he had his first crop.
  Today, Reed, 66, farms 1,350 acres of catfish ponds along with his 2,000 acres of cotton. The catfish brings in much more money than cotton ever did.
  ‘‘If someone had told me back then that catfish farming was my future, I’d have told him he was crazy as a switch end,’’ Reed said.
  U.S. catfish farmers, 70 percent of whom are Reed’s Mississippi neighbors, produced 439 million pounds of catfish in 1994 worth $374 million. That’s a far cry from the 5.7 million pounds produced in 1970.
  In 1966, Reed was one of a handful of Mississippi farmers who pioneered the industry. During the first few years, he sold his catfish to ‘‘live haulers,’’ truck drivers who carried the fish to fishing ponds outside urban areas ‘‘up north,’’ Reed said, where the pond owners would charge people for the chance to catch them.
  ‘‘After the first few crops, we realized we could grow catfish successfully and actually grow more pounds than we had been led to believe,’’ Reed said. ‘‘A few of us got together and opened up a processing plant in Morgan City, Mississippi, and then we started a few of them all-you-can-eat fish houses.’’
  By 1973, catfish farming was on its way, and Reed and other growers got together to nail down the other end of the supply chain, forming Producers Feed Co. to begin manufacturing fish food for the farms.
  In 1986, Reed and other catfish farmers and feed mills formed the Catfish Institute, the industry’s marketing arm. It conducts national and international advertising campaigns aimed at raising consumer awareness of the product.
  Today, catfish is the fifth most popular fish in the nation, with per-capita consumption averaging just less than a pound a year. Growers credit their success to their ability to produce tasty fillets competitive in price with supermarket cod and halibut.
  But that success also has resulted from the institute’s aggressive marketing campaign aimed at individual consumers, institutional users like public schools, and restaurants and cafeterias.
  In Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas, the nation’s top four catfish-producing states, the industry employs 12,000 people and contributes more than $3.5 billion to the states’ economies, according to the Catfish Institute.
  At the beginning of this year, there were 167,280 acres of land being used for catfish production, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
  While there’s room for more catfish sales in this country, institute director Bill Allen said the potential overseas is even greater. Last year the institute targeted Germany as its first European market, promoting catfish as an alternative to premium fish fillets.
  ‘‘It’s certainly a pretty good position to be in when you realize that oceans are finite in the amount of fish they will supply in the future,’’ Allen said. ‘‘Catfish has been the one legitimate aquaculture industry in the United States during the last 20 years.’’
  And the industry has been a major factor in the economics of rural Mississippi, Allen said.
  ‘‘I think we probably take its benefits for granted,’’ Allen said. ‘‘You ride through downtown Belzoni and you wouldn’t call this an extremely prosperous region.
  ‘‘But ride up the road 50 or 60 miles where there’s not any catfish production and you’ll see boarded-up storefronts and abandoned towns,’’ he said. ‘‘We’re doing OK.’’