SCHÄFER'S SHRIMPS

THE FARM WITH COWS AND PIGS NO LONGER PAID THE BILLS, SO HEINRICH SCHÄFER STARTED GERMANY’S FIRST SHRIMP FARM.

When Heinrich Schäfer talks shrimps, he waxes lyrical about the pH value of the water and the way the animals tend to eat each other. But then the conversation turns to the demise of agriculture. Gourmet chefs like Tim Raue and Johann Lafer, who order their tropical delicacies from him, may not know that the two stories are connected. Heinrich Schäfer was born in 1949 in Affinghausen in Lower Saxony, on a farm that has been in his family’s possession for 450 years. Each day he witnesses anew the agony of German farmers. Where once there were 50 farms in the area, now there are five. Stepping inside what was once his machine shed, a blast of heat hits him in the face. “32 degrees Celsius, 80 percent humidity,” he explains, pulling off his parka. Behind a glass panel are 160,000 specimens of the species Penaeus vannamei, pacific white shrimps, swimming in large tanks: Schäfer runs the first and only shrimp farm in Germany. His equipment looks surprisingly primitive, almost as if he had put it together himself out of rough timber and plastic sheeting. It is in fact a sophisticated and very delicate system. For fear of imitators, he prefers to keep the technical details to himself; visitors must content themselves with looking through the glass panel. There are tanks arranged on four levels. The five-day old larvae flown in from Florida are introduced into the topmost tank. Over the coming months they work their way down via drain pipes, one level at a time. After six months they are swimming around in the harvest tank. At 20 centimeters in length and 25 grams in weight, they are an exotic delicacy, ready to be eaten. This largest tank occupies almost the whole length of the shed, providing Heinrich Schäfer with a weekly harvest of around 10,000 shrimps.

SENSITIVE CANNIBALS
A slim man stripped to the waist is taking a water sample. Schäfer's son Marco spends all day in this heat, checking water quality and feed. Fourteen times a day the shrimps are fed a mixture of soy meal, peas, cereals and fish meal. The actual work is done automatically by meter-high funnel-shaped feeders, but Marco Schäfer is constantly employed in recalibrating the volumes. Shrimps are very sensitive. “If they get too much, the water turns. Too little, and they eat one another,” says Heinrich Schäfer.

The demand for shrimps is high. Around 100 tons of deep-frozen crustaceans arrive in Germany every day, mainly from Asia and Latin America. But the imported product has a bad reputation. In Thailand and Vietnam, mangrove forests are being cleared to make way for breeding tanks; sometimes the flesh contains residues of antibiotics. Heinrich Schäfer uses no drugs in his tanks, and has samples taken regularly by the veterinary college in Hanover. And his product tastes good: Schäfer sells his shrimps to Germany's finest restaurants for €39 per kilo—four times the price of discount store products. He has found a niche.

A painting hangs on the wall in Heinrich Schäfer’s office. It shows the family farm: an imposing house with sheds and barns, surrounded by the family’s own land. A picture-book farm. “We used to have 20 cows, and pigs and chickens too. We grew everything we needed.” But as long ago as the 1970s, Heinrich Schäfer became aware that there would be no future for the family in traditional farming. He sold his livestock and set himself up as a contractor. He ploughed his neighbors’ fields, harvested their crops and baled the straw. But after a while this business also ceased to be worthwhile, and Schäfer moved on, this time to biogas. Since 2006 he has had two plants which are fueled with corn that he grows on his 100 hectares of land; another 60 hectares of corn are bought in. Each morning he tips twenty tons into the biogas units. The two mini power plants have an electrical output of 500 kilowatts, which is fed into the local grid. “That paid for itself right away,” says Schäfer.

BANKS REFUSED TO LEND
The waste heat from the biogas plants would have been enough for 70 homes. “But there aren’t that many houses in Affinghausen,” says Schäfer. Initially, the heat evaporated unused: “But I couldn't stand the waste.” He kept seeing television programs showing cooks preparing shrimps. He took his wife to a restaurant in Cuxhaven, and the dish of the day was a shrimp platter. Then the idea came to him. Marco was dispatched to Texas to spend two months with the renowned shrimp researcher Addison Lawrence. The months of study at the experimental farm at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi paid off. There is probably no one in Germany today who knows more about shrimp farming than Marco Schäfer. The villagers thought the Schäfers were crazy. The banks refused to lend them money, while the planning and veterinary authorities were unsure whether they even had the power to approve a shrimp farm. Heinrich Schäfer couldn’t believe what was going on. “After all, it’s a product that’s in demand in the marketplace,” he says.

His shrimps are sold under the brand name Marella, which has an international, even exotic ring to it. In fact, the word is rooted in the northern German flatlands. “My granddaughters,” says Schäfer with a twinkle in his eye, “are called Maren, Nele and Mara.”

Text: Anne Meyer, Photos: Kathrin Harms
Bilfinger Berger Magazine 1/2012