The prawns are growing fast in the seawater ponds at Cardwell on the edge of the stunning Hinchinbrook channel in far north Queensland, owned by recently rebranded public company Seafarms Group.
It’s a sight that delights Seafarms’ aquaculture director Dallas Donovan, who has turned the poorly performing Cardwell prawn enterprise around since it was bought from Togo Group founder and Medina-Vibe accommodation mogul Ervin Vidor early last year for $11.2 million.
Already production has lifted from 600 tonnes to more than 1400 tonnes a year from the two existing Cardwell farms. A third farm has been purchased for $4.2m at nearby Ingham and the company has diversified from banana prawn farming into more popular tiger prawns.
Seafarms is now Australia’s biggest grower of cultivated prawns, supplying 25 per cent of the local market worth a highly profitable $15,000 a tonne, and has Australia’s largest commercial “baby” prawn hatchery at Innisfail.
With 150ha of prawn ponds in full production, major contracts with Coles and Woolworths, a revamped marketing strategy under its Crystal Bay prawn brand, and local consumer demand vastly exceeding supply, it sounds enough to keep Donovan both busy and happy. But for the experienced Australian-born prawn manager who previously ran a vast 3500ha prawn farm in Saudi Arabia, Seafarms’ north Queensland base is little more than a bright beginning — a profitable but small-scale pilot program.
The real game for ASX-listed Seafarms Group is Project Sea Dragon, an ambitious $1.5 billion aquaculture project it intends to build at Legune Station on the Northern Territory-Western Australia border.
The $56m company, previously listed as the Commodities Group, proposes to build 10,000ha of saltwater ponds stretching across the estuary and floodplains of the Victoria and Keep rivers, producing an astounding 150,000 tonnes of tiger prawns, mainly for export to Asia. But the company also has its eye on the high-priced Australian market.
It hopes to get its costs of production low enough with scale to replace the 30,000 tonnes of cheap prawn imports from Vietnam and Thailand now flooding into Coles and Woolworths every year at less than $20 a kilogram, and to compete with the 18,000 tonnes of wild-caught Australian prawns from the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Queensland coast, the supply of which is dwindling.
“Everything we do is not just about getting our Queensland farms running better but about getting ready to run Sea Dragon in the Northern Territory,” says Donovan. “Sea Dragon will all be about industrialised aquaculture on a scale never before seen in Australia. It has to be low-cost, highly automated production both because of our remote location and so we can compete, and that means we have to have the best genetics, the best management and farming systems and the people all in place before we start.”
There have been doubts about the Sea Dragon project ever since the idea was first floated in 2011 by the founder of the WA-based Seafarms Group, Ian Trahar.
Originally the aquaculture project was a vague concept based on big prawn ponds and algae tanks fed from underground aquifers and excess water expelled from some of the major mines in the Pilbara region. Prawn specialists ridiculed the scheme and said it would never happen.
But Seafarms may have the last laugh.
Since acquiring its north Queensland prawn farms early last year, turning the company into a major player with aquaculture expertise and marketing power, more observers have started watching the progress of Sea Dragon with interest.
A second big plank in the company’s advancement was its $57m acquisition — at this stage expressed as a three-year purchase option — over the 180,000ha Legune cattle station. The announcement instantly moved the project to a more credible coastal location with excellent access to plentiful freshwater and seawater, relative proximity to the fast-growing East Kimberley agricultural town of Kununurra, the potential for its own shallow barge jetty and good access to Kununurra airport and nearby Wyndham deep port.
In a third strategic move, Seafarms’ Innisfail prawn hatchery has just won the right to become the centre of excellence for the field of prawn genetics and genomic advancement as part of a $5m Australian Research Centre program, placing it way ahead of other companies in improving the potential growth rates and productivity of its prawn broodstock. Finally, when the federal government unveiled its northern Australia strategy last week, top of its list of priorities was expanding development in the Ord agricultural zone, and sealing the Keep River road towards Legune station, with the investment and export potential of Project Sea Dragon getting a special mention.
“It is the core focus of our business — in many ways, we are an Ord stage 4 development,” Seafarms executive chairman Ian Trahar said yesterday from China, in reference to the tripling of the size of the Ord’s irrigated area in three stages. “We will provide hundreds of jobs, we will have a processing factory at Kununurra, we will need 737 freighters flying fresh prawns out to Mumbai, Tokyo and China from a longer runway at Kununurra. Everything we do now as a company is about executing Project Sea Dragon.’’
The next stage for Seafarms is raising $20m for its feasibility study. Trahar is confident that task is almost complete.
Before pension funds and investors are prepared to throw their weight behind the project — and its first $150m phase with 1000ha of prawn ponds in production by 2017 — extensive government approvals, native title agreements and environmental impact studies must be completed around its Legune location.
“It sorts out the risks and reduces them to a level where banks and equity investors are prepared to look at the Sea Dragon project seriously,” says Seafarms’ business development manager and chief accountant Ian Leijer.
“It’s really saying we have a regulatory and approval licence to operate even before we start construction.”
Donovan says he is astounded by the potential of northern Australia for large-scale industrialised aquaculture.
Its remote location, away from industry, pollution and other aquaculture operations, means it is as protected as possible from unwanted diseases, the greatest risk to big prawn farms.
But its isolation also adds challenges, such as how to get large amounts of prawn pellets and feed to Legune and how to transport a constant supply of healthy young juvenile prawn stock from a future Seafarms hatchery in Darwin to the site. (A direct barge appears to be the best option at this stage.)
The company has also spent much time bringing seven international aquaculture managers from South America, the Middle East, The Philippines and India to Australia under 457 visas, together with their families — men such as Seafarms production manager Filipino Jairo Llanos, who will form the nucleus of the future Legune team. More than 200 workers will also be needed as the project expands on-site, with Trahar in discussions with indigenous owners about future training and aquaculture jobs for their community.
“The potential up there is so huge, from a prawn farming, water and environmental perspective, that, funnily, people ask ‘if it is so great, why hasn’t it been done before?’,” says Donovan.
“We could do so much with industrial aquaculture in the Gulf, in the Territory, not just Seafarms but other aquaculture projects, but unless someone like us starts and shows it can be done, it will never happen.”
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