A friend of mine, Gusmang, offered me to ride with him to visit a shrimp pond. I was a bit curious, why he was interested to visit the shrimp pond. Is he going to start a shrimp pond business?
riding on a dirt road
Riding about half an hour outside the town, then into a dirt road, we finally arrived in the shrimp pond. A man in his fifties, greeted us after we opened the gate to the pond. His name was Mr. Agung, and he was Gusmang's friend.
overview of the shrimp pond.
I was wondering what the bamboo bridge was for.
Mr. Agung walked out to the bridge and caught some shrimps.
It was only 8 gram, still long time before harvest.
We sat down cross-legged on a map on a semi open building overlooking the pond. Then, automatically we talked about breeding shrimps.
As we had conversation, I had a look at the two ponds. Each was about 200 sqm which total 110,000 baby shrimps in them that Mr. Agung and his workers put in 56 days earlier. Because of the quick changing weather from cold to hot in few days, the shrimp growth had been slowed down.
According to Mr. Agung, he was lucky that his shrimps were not all dead because of the changing weather. He had his only about he had only about 6 percent of them dead after 56 days. If he harvested them at this time, though, he would get nett profit of USD 1000. Usually he got about USD 15000 to 20,000.
He was worried that the shrimps would not grow in size he had to "cut loss" no point of "hodling" any longer since he had to spend USD 150 daily for feeding those tiny little creatures.
Somebody has to clean the water from dead shrimps, or rubbish. That's the job of this man.
I tried hard to follow their conversation because, to be honest, it's a bit out of my head. They talked about water pH, water salinity, green algae, bacteria, plankton (not the one from Sponge Bob Squre Pants 😃). Those things were related to shrimp breeding.
Well, there's quite a funny remark Mr. Agung made at the end. He said, if you want to be very rich, start a shrimp pond business, and if you want to go bankrupt, start a shrimp pond business.
I'll stay on Hive.