Profit hard to net for catfish farms

— Steve Johnson says there is a catchphrase for the current state of the catfish industry: “gloom and doom.”

“Everybody is pretty depressed about the profitability of the business because feed prices are so big,” said Johnson, a member of the board of directors for Catfish Farmers of Arkansas.

At the 2013 Catfish Farmers of America’s annual convention Friday, a panel discussed the industry’s struggle to turn a profit.

“On a scale of one to 10, you can talk to a food-fish producer and get a state of the industry that is a three or four,” said Jeff Baxter, a hybrid catfish producer from Watson in Desha County.

He told the audience: “If we continue to get 85 cents [per pound] for fish, there won’t be as many people in this room next year.”

High feed costs and low market prices have many catfish farmers converting ponds into fields that can be used to grow more profitable crops, said Johnson, who attended the convention, which started Thursday and ends today.

He said 2 pounds of feed costs about 25 cents for a fish that has a market price of 80 to 85 cents per pound.

Because of low prices, catfish farmers saw their income from fish sales drop in2012. The sale of food-size fish produced $17.4 million in revenue, compared with $26.8 million in 2011, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service. A food-size fish ranges from three-fourths pound to a little over 3 pounds.

“It’s making it difficult for farmers to make the money they want,” Johnson said. “The existing acres of catfish continues to shrink.”

Johnson’s farm in Paragould was once evenly split between catfish and bait fish. In 2009, that started to change as Johnson started to move away from catfish.

Now the farm is about 95 percent bait fish, with catfish ponds covering 150 acres instead of 1,000 acres.

This year, 8,200 pond acres in Arkansas will be used for catfish production, a 15 percent decrease from the 9,700acres used in 2012, according to the statistics service.

Baxter, who spoke on the convention’s panel, said short term relief for catfish farmers could come with a price change in the cost of the soybeans and corn used in feed.

Relief for farmers would come “if we could just get commodity prices down and get a little bit more for our product,” Baxter said.

Ted McNulty, director of the Division of Aquaculture for the Arkansas Department of Agriculture, said he saw signs for optimism for the catfish industry at the convention, mainly in that catfish processors mentioned that they need more fish when they go to market.

“That’s when prices will go up,” he said.

But Randy Rhodes, president of Harvest Select catfish, said he thinks it will be another three years before the catfish industry sees growth.

“We are dealing with a list of circumstances,” he said.

Business, Pages 27 on 02/16/2013

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