Sea Urchin Farming Methods

Sea Urchin Farming Methods

I was talking to my father about a business idea he was considering. He asked me what I thought, so I responded with some questions.

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He started asking me about these sea urchin farming methods he had been researching. He told me that the United States imports a lot of sea urchins from Japan, but that the Japanese are exporting less because more Japanese are eating them domestically because they are considered to be healthier and better for you. So he was thinking of importing sea urchin eggs from Japan and growing them in Mexico. Then he could sell them back to the United States as a cheaper substitute for the imported ones.

I asked him how much it cost him to import one kilogram of sea urchins from Japan and how much does he think it would cost to grow one kilogram of his own sea urchins in Mexico? He didn't know, so I asked him to find out before continuing. I also told him that if the cost of sea urchin eggs from Japan is really cheap, then they should probably be using it instead of raising their own in Mexico.

In the sea urchin industry, growers typically have to feed their urchins by hand. They either grow them individually in cages or in net pens, and they have to dive down a few times a day to feed them. This is both labor-intensive and expensive.

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At Taylor Shellfish, we decided to try something different. We discovered that we could raise about 50,000 urchins per acre in our tidelands without having to feed them at all. The urchins survived entirely on the natural food supply in the water column. We called this "open water farming."