The landlocked Southeast LA County city of Downey is known for airplane production and the Apollo space program. Now, just a few steps away from the Columbia Memorial Space Center, the city is home to one giant leap for prawn farming.
In an old warehouse that once held an airplane parts factory, TransparentSea Farm produces nearly 1 million bratwurst-sized prawns a year — while using about the same amount of water as a typical American family.
Founder Steve Sutton hopes the 2-year-old farm is just the start of a more sustainable source of shrimp in Southern California.
According to the National Fisheries Institute, people in America eat more shrimp than any other seafood — more than canned tuna and salmon combined — and 90% of that shrimp is imported from Asia and Latin America, where coastal mangrove forests are cleared to create large open-air man-made ponds.
Sutton says TransparentSea Farm is 30 times more space-efficient than outdoor shrimp farms. In the warehouse, a network of large PVC pipes feeds into filters and pumps that add oxygen and remove carbon dioxide. Each tank holds a lazy river of 30,000 prawns swimming in a circle.
There’s also a tank filled with bacteria used to treat shrimp waste.
“We grow trillions of bacteria that are essential in processing the dissolved waste of the shrimp. You could grow shrimp in your bathtub, but it would be good for a few hours or even a couple days, and then they would die because there's no bacteria to break down their waste,” Sutton says.
In just three months, the prawns are ready to be packaged and sold.
“We just harvest the same day. Everything's pre-ordered and delivered that same day,” Sutton says.
They may be local, but that doesn’t make them cheap. Prices run $20 to $29 per pound based on the size.
Steve Sutton compares the size of TransparentSea’s “collossal prawns” next to a large tank of Pacific whiteleg prawns at his shrimp farm in Downey. Photo by Jackson Cantrell.
For now Sutton sells every prawn he produces, but he still hopes to lower prices with the construction of a second, larger farm nearby on cheaper land. Sutton plans for his new farm to automate many of the manual tasks that drive up labor costs.
The same-day freshness has piqued the interest of chefs like Gilberto Cetina, whose restaurant Holbox at Mercado La Paloma in Historic South Central was named restaurant of the year by the LA Times. Fresh prawns are critical for dishes like aguachile de camarón, which Cetina describes as a “no-tomato, herbaceous, very acidic cousin of the ceviche.
Cetina says TransparentSea prawns are perfect for the dish. “It's such a clean, crisp, flavor with no aftertaste and none of that iodine flavors that you get from a lot of farmed shrimp,” he says.
Holbox chef Gilberto Cetina prepares shrimp aguachile with TransparentSea farm prawns. Photo by Jackson Cantrell.
But how do the shrimp feel about all of this? Yes, we’re going there.
Researchers at the London School of Economics studied pain and behavior in decapod crustaceans and found the animals satisfy five of the eight criteria the researchers developed for determining sentience.
That prompted the U.K. government to recognize shrimp and prawn sentience through its 2022 Animal Welfare Act.
Andrés Jiménez Zorilla heads a London-based group called the Shrimp Welfare Project. He says when you consider that half a trillion shrimp and prawns are farmed annually around the world, shrimp welfare is worth a discussion.
As for indoor shrimp farms like TransparentSea in Downey, Jiménez Zorilla rates their animal welfare protections as hit or miss. The high density of animals is a negative, he says, but the constant water oxygenation and quality monitoring is a positive.
Steve Sutton at TransparentSea isn’t spending much time on the decapod crustacean morality calculus, but he says healthy shrimp are good for business.
“Do they have any feelings? I don't know,” he says gamely. “I can tell you that anatomically they're more similar to a cockroach than they are to a goat or a cow. They're much more similar. But if we were farming cockroaches, we would do it as well as we could, with as much respect for the animals as we can, while also dealing with a global reality, which is that we need protein.”