GUTHRIE, Okla. ( KFOR ) — They look pretty big for shrimp, but then again, the creatures Andy and Micah Chapman are raising — are prawns, native to the Eastern Pacific Ocean around Mexico.
Lately, they are growing much more plentiful on a farm in Logan County.
“We just received a batch of 22,000,” Andy tells us.
Andy and his wife Micah had normal jobs until a couple of years ago, when they took the plunge and bought a derelict marijuana grow operation north of Guthrie.
“I write computer software,” says Andy sheepishly.
Micah laughs and adds, “We came home and jumped in.”
They had a lot of ideas, but a local restaurant owner suggested a product he thought would be in constant demand.
“They said, ‘if you’ll sell prawns, we’ll buy them’,” recalls Andy.
The first shipment of baby prawn came in February 2024 — dumped into huge tanks of carefully maintained salt water and oxygenated by special pumps with temperatures maintained between 82 and 86 degrees.
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He figures, “They come to us about 12 days old.”
The Chapmans incorporated beneficial bacteria to keep the prawns healthy.
“It’s a nitrogen cycle.”
From little to serving size takes a little more than three months.
Andy explains, “After about a month, we moved several thousand over there to a different tank.”
Pansies and Prawn is their business name (even though the cut flower part of their business didn’t work out as well).
Their shrimp farm is still in the proof-of-concept phase. They only sell their product at the Farmer’s Market in Guthrie but they’re both planning to expand soon.
They are, for now, the only shrimp farm in Oklahoma.
The grammatically correct plural of ‘prawn’ is still in question here.
“Someone corrected me and said the plural is ‘prawns’,” Andy smiles.
The idea is to add more walls, more tanks, more shrimp and start supplying local restaurants who’ve already been asking about them.
“We’re also looking into mussels and oysters,” says Micah.
From the Gulf to Guthrie, from ocean to Oklahoma, isn’t so far off as it used to be.
For more information about Pansies and Prawn, including where you can purchase, click here .
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