The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) funds beginning farmer training through a competitive grant program. The program's goal is to provide knowledge and technical support to beginning farmers, sufficient for them to start farming that will become profitable within a three year period. Typically, aquaculture is excluded from beginning farmer training because of the high cost of entry in temperate U. S. states such as Kentucky, higher risks, and marketing difficulties, when compared to more traditional food products such as produce and poultry.
Despite the challenges associated with aquaculture, it should not be totally forsaken by beginning farmers. Many of these farmers are refugees who have traditional consumption habits of live/fresh fish, which could lead to a significant marketing advantage within their communities. Tilapia aquaculture can be conducted in outdoor tanks, requiring modest investments, and the product could be sold in African and Hispanic communities which have shown a preference for live tilapia. Therefore, aquaculture might have a place on limited-resource farms, even as a tool of supplementary income and whole farm risk mitigation.
This project, funded by the USDA beginning farmer training program, investigated the production and marketing of tilapia in outdoor tanks during the warm season in Kentucky. The young fish were purchased from commercial hatcheries, grown for 120 to 150 days, and auctioned to ethnic consumers in urban areas of the state following the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak model. This experimental auction revealed a range of willingness-to-pay for the live fish. Using production and marketing data from this project, business feasibility and profitability measures were determined, such as initial investment, labor requirements, a range of the cost of production, expected annual profit, and a predicted returns on investment. The results showed significant risk, i.e., considerable chances of having both profit and loss; additionally, direct-to-consumer sales in ethnic markets was the only avenue for small-scale, outdoor, tilapia production to be profitable.