Catfishing In An Economy Down The Toilet :;

It's amazing just how much we're affected by the "global economy" along with rapid rising oil prices. Here are some bits from today's New York Times about southern catfish farmers going out of business.

LELAND, Miss. — Catfish farmers across the South, unable to cope with the soaring cost of corn and
soybean feed, are draining their ponds.
“It’s a dead business,” said John Dillard, who pioneered the commercial farming of catfish in the late 1960s.
Last year Dillard & Company raised 11 million fish. Next year it will raise none. People can eat imported
fish, Mr. Dillard said, just as they use imported oil.
As for his 55 employees? “Those jobs are gone.”

[snip]

Perhaps nowhere has the rise in crop prices caused more convulsions than in the Mississippi Delta, the hub
of the nation’s catfish industry. This is a hard-luck, poverty-plagued region, and raising catfish in artificial
ponds was one of the few mainstays.
Then the economics went awry. Feed is now more than half the total cost of raising catfish, compared with a
third of the cost of beef and pork production, according to a Mississippi State analysis. That makes catfish
more vulnerable. But if the commodities continue to rocket up — and some analysts believe they will —
other industries will fall victim as well.

I hadn't thought about corn going to ethanol production affecting catfish farmers, but this seems to be pretty dire.

Rising feed prices were the final straw for Dillard & Company, which decided to close last January. Eighty
of its 10- to 20-acre pools are empty already. An additional 170 will follow as soon as their fish are big
enough to sell.
“It’s easy. You just pull the plug,” Mr. King said, surveying a pool that was nearly dry. Nearby, half a dozen
men were running their nets through a pond, then hoisting the last of its catfish onto a truck.
“I’ve been doing this for 23 years,” said one of the workers, Craig Morgan. “I don’t know what I’ll do now.
And there are a bunch of me’s out there.”

emphasis added is mine!

I have a friend who I seldom see who runs a catfish operation about 40 miles away. Buddy is old school and technology challenged so he doesn't use e-mail, but I think I'll run by there in a few days to see how he is doing. His operation is pretty small compared to what we're reading about here, but I'm sure that the impact of higher feed prices is just as crucial, if not more so!

There is also a feed mill down in Guntersville, about 20 miles away from me and I wonder just how this is affecting them. I don't know anyone who works at Wayne Feeds, but I may go down to Guntersville this weekend and ask around.