 I'm not really used to doing all this, so we'll just get started. About three or four years ago I got laid off at work and about a year into it we figured out we had to have something to come up with some more money. So we did some research, one thing and the other, so we decided we had to add fish to it. Made several trips, come to Jeff City, got a hold of Chuck Hicks and Russ Gerlach over there which has been our aces for quite a while and all of this. We did a lot of research and our biggest problem was financing. We got all of our paperwork together and went to the bank and they was not, there's no history of it in our area. And I like to make this one little story, year before we were in approval of all John Deere equipment, we wanted to do an upgrade on a tractor. I made a phone call and I got approved for $45,000 over the phone to go buy a tractor the next day. We put this all together and I need 26 to get this all together and they had, they went to the board members, it took two weeks to get approved for it. And that was bottom line, there is no history. Anyway, we've been going at this, we finally got started. We're short on time so I'm just going to talk and if anybody has anything to ask, just go. We got started in May of 2010, this is what we started off with. We had one pond that was going to use four and a half acres. Right up against the bank it's 12 and a half foot deep so that's where we got started. We got more but that's where we ended up. We stretched two cables, clear across it. We didn't have a clue how I was going to do that and there was a feed truck sitting there so it's time went on we started building our cages. There are four by four by eight coated chicken wire, we got a PVC sewer pipe along top there for float rings and we put a feed ring inside of it. And all this time we're pretty dumb. We've all grown up on farms, thought fish was no big deal but we found out we didn't know a thing. So we put in, we put in 14 cages our first year. Okay, there is a, I think it's June the 6th, we bought 10,000 hybrid bluegills to put into them. The two aerators we bought from Kansas City, they're like $13, $1400 each. Our biggest cost of getting started we had to run primary electricity almost a quarter mile. So we went $5,000 right off the top. We didn't know if we was going to make a penny. That was our first experience. We give $0.52 the first year plus freight on them. $0.52 a piece. Yeah. But we found out on our second and third year 90% of fish are hatched in southern Missouri and in Arkansas. We did a little more research and a few phone calls when we re-stalked it was $0.26. We found out not everybody's out there to help us out you know. So anyway it gets better. That was one first. There's a picture of Chuck Hicks and Russ Gerlach. They've been our aces for instance day one. This is like in July after we got started and they come over and just see how things was going. They've been over they brought some of their students over to see what we're doing. Went to a prawn harvest in can you remember where we went for that? I don't know. It was down in southern Missouri. Everybody kept talking about the prawns. We ought to get into the prawns. We didn't know what the heck a prawn was but every time we turned around they said that's what we ought to do. There's big money in them. So we went to our first harvest in September. They was alright. They was kind of small. They're basically they're known as Freshwater Shrimp. Mary looked up some stuff this year on the computer and they call them Lobsterettes. Now the certain nicknames. October went over to Jeff City down to Culver Farm and they had their harvest of them. We was a lot more impressed with them. These are some of the students that's come down there to farm. Russ and Chuck has got a wonderful relationship with these kids. I think they all just grow up together. These guys here they raise come out at nine per pound. So they're significant. You can actually see. So then we're sitting here thinking well now we wouldn't mind trying this but then we're back to the same deal how are we going to get the bank to go along with this story you know. The prawn is something they ain't ever even heard of. And the best thing we did I think we brought home about 50 pounds. We passed them out mostly that night. We got around and about a week or so later we invited the bank to come down and have lunch with us. Mary fixed lunch. I'm going to introduce this is Mary. She's my assistant assailant and cohort on about all these projects. She's the one that does it when I'm not there. And she had these all fixed up and nice dinner and everything and when we got down the bank president had never been to our place. We do a local bank so we do basically with one loan officer. He'd been down for farm visits and everything but the president he brought three other loan officers with him. They hung around afternoon we went down to the ponds and toured it. They got ready to leave president walked up to me and shook my hand he says well you tell Danny what you need. So that pretty well got us in by fixing them dinner. We went to Ava Missouri. We got thinking we could raise some trout in the winter months when our water cooled off. So we went down to, oh I can't find all my notes. Oh Marvin and David Emerson are losing track here. They raised trout farm in Ava. It's a beautiful place. This is their office house. You'll notice right here this is a spring that comes up back over here and actually runs underneath this is an office out here and this is a spring that runs right underneath their house. It's beautiful. We spent the day down there with them had lunch of course at some of their incubation. So we decided we was going to try it. We come home and we built a pin in our pond that we had and once again we didn't know what tech was doing. So we just started in. We built eight foot panels 20 foot long PVC pipe and coated them. Drove some pipe in the pond. We did have to put some construction fence uppers. We found out they jumped. We put our fence in a water level and thought this is stupid. Now they can jump out. So we had to go back and put some more on top of it. But anyway that was in November. We bought, I don't know, three or four hundred the trout brought them in and we raised them up through the winter. We started to do our harvest in March. We started advertising this was really our first harvest we had got to do and we was going to just have a fish day out of our house. We had three calls. What does it? Rotary Club, Lions and Chamber of Commerce all wanted to come in and meet with them on their meeting days to put on their program. So we did that. Thought that was pretty neat but we was not prepared. We just had some pictures and the gift to gab I guess. We was trying to get them out so we finally got the scene around them. We had a four foot dip scene I guess you want to call it. There's some of them there. They come out pretty good but trout to eat in our neighborhood it did not work. We got a, ended up there's some of them there. Chinese food market in Kansas City ended up taking the biggest end of them later on. But they wasn't quite big enough for them. It was their issue with them. We had a real beautiful crowd and beautiful day. There's some of the best pictures right there. The girls, they like to play with them. So there's Russ. We started building our own prawn pond in April and there's Mary and one of her buddies. She's out inspecting it one night. We decided to go ahead and start doing it. The pond itself cost us a little over $6,000 to dig it. It's a half acre pond. We put this control structure in there and I got it a shy drainage. It's water control structure. It's a 12 or 1400 I believe up there. But the neat thing about it is there's gates in it and we can raise and lower water level by just opening it up and we can pull gates out. There's six, eight inch gates at a time. So we can do quite a little bit of different stuff with it. So we buried it in and it's quite a fiasco. We had to buy a pump. Most all of our water comes out of our big pond and right now we have to move it around because we don't have a well. So this is what our prawn pond looked like. We did apply for the grant. We got it and it was to try to raise bluegill and prawns in the same water because the bluegill will eat the prawn. There's no doubt about it. But we was going to try to do that to make more use out of our water, our electricity and everything else to actually make more money off our half acre pond. In theory it worked but in reality it sucked. When they brought our fish in they put in some little guys that got in there and they got out of our cages. So there went a big chunk of our prawn. And our bluegill we're still all learning the labor because it's only in here from June to October. The labor putting the bluegill in here and taking them out just ain't hardly worth the trouble. Just leaving the prawn in there is actually a better deal we found out. It helps on the money but the labor comes into play there and I don't really think it's going to pan out. That's some more of the pictures of them there. We got two aerators in there running. That's my son Eric. He's a feeding one morning. I don't know if you can see. This is some of the prawn feed right there going out. We feed the fish and the prawn both at the same time. Like I say in theory it was a beautiful idea but we also put some large mouth bass in that year and that's a picture of them eating. That was some of the bigger bluegill which we'd bought from the year before and that's the size of them in one year's time. This was some of them that come in. We bought them three and four inch ones. There's some of the bass that we had bought this July. Put them in. This here are some pictures of some channel cats we had. We got some white ones and stuff in there. We're actually harvesting them right now. We got some of the we've got them sold. Some of the regular channel cat are weighing 14, 15 pounds. We've got them sold. The albinos they don't want so we're just going to put them in the freezer. We had our prawn harvest on October 15th Ok this is September. This is a sample we took in September last year. This is October 15th of last year we had our first prawn harvest. That's some of them there. That's what they come out looking like. There's about 14 per pound I think and that we come up with. But our poundage was not good because of our bluegills. We just took an old feedbunk and that's what made our catch our pipe come out if you remember from the slide the forwards on the valve. It comes out in the ground and we took an old feedbunk and we did the legs and put some expanded metal in there and it works pretty good. The water comes out and goes out to expanded metal then blows the prawn out on the plastic bunk yet. It seems we got cattle and stuff. We have that stuff in the scrap pile so that's what we used. These tanks we got a pair of them. We come over here to High Point, Missouri and this gentleman was going out of business and we bought his supply. We bought quite a bit of stuff the first time around. We ended up using most all of it. We had to relay for life people come out and they served lunch for that day and Mary even got in a picture cleaning. That day went on until dark cleaning fish and we finally got tired of it. Mary had hired a pilot to come and take pictures that day and it was a surprise to me and I didn't even have enough sense to know what I could have this guy was doing up here. This is a picture of a farm, the hay pile and everything out there. You can see the aerators in this one on the big pond we still got cages of bluegill and ant. That is the half-faker prawn pond. It's just almost dry at that point. In December we went down to Frankfurt, Kentucky and joined the Prawn Association. This is some of the pictures from that. We spent three days down there I believe. This is Laura too and I'm terrible with names today. Jim Tidwell. He's President of the Aquaculture Association in Kentucky State University. We'd met another guy down there Craig Umstrom. He is the one that raises about all the prawns that ever come up in this area. In Florida they got to be hatched in salt water then they gradually transform into fresh water and that's how he can actually bring them up here. He is working with these guys immensely and this year he's doing an all-male species. They've went in and did some work on the females, did a chromosome change so ISIS was like an 80% and he says no it's 100% males that they're going to produce and I don't know how or why or whatever and for the most part I don't care that's his problem. They're going to cost a little more but they'll grow better plus you get rid of the deal with the sex fighting and this that and the other and we're hoping that's going to work a little better. This is some of the pictures from Kentucky State. They do a big deal on paddle fish. In January we had to get some bluegill up we noticed all along all summer we had some damage to our cages we'd drained our big pond about five or six years ago and put a new water line and new overflow for the cattle in there and apparently we didn't get them all drained but this is the guys that we come out with and they kept coming up in our sands when it was so cold and most of them is like 9 or 10 pounders and they did us enough damage so they went to the house too but the biggest problem with them they wasn't fit to eat. Since they are a channel cat and we're feeding the bluegill and everything else down there the bluegill get a 42% protein ration with high fat content. On channel cat that didn't work because there's just 32% with low fat. These are guys just all turned to butter balls. Mary tried cooking them and I think the dogs ended up with them finally. She could not get the fat out of them so we learned we couldn't do that. This is a picture here of one of our first bluegill cages that we put in. This is January of 12 in 10. June of 10. This is some of the first ones here. We sold these. These are actually going to kids fishing tournament is where they headed. There's 124 cubic feet there that one cage harvested $1,600 gross. Okay that to me because we raised cattle that to me is two caves at a good market and that's in our area 7 to 8 acres of ground. Not 100 cubic feet gross. I don't know we're guessing over 1000. We're not real good bookkeepers at this point. We got so much going on we don't do. But that's still over 100 cubic feet versus 6 or 7 acres. That's not bad. Plus one of the beauties of this and what I like stressed everybody else it takes little to no machinery for us to work. We got a four wheeler a boat and 3 or 4 or 5 gallon buckets. That's 90% of what we got invested other than ponds. You know in electricity we don't we got tractors and balers and all that but it don't we don't need none of that for this. And that's the beauty what could be done on such different levels. Somebody had 2 or 3 acres or 100 acres. You wanted some just for yourself or some to sell you know you can just do whatever you want to with this. The electricity like say is the biggest deal they got to be they got to be populated at this density to make any money. And at that density you're going to have to have the aeration. Unless you're just wanting to do some for your house you know and stuff like that. We did have some channel cat we'd kept in these. We'd bought some earlier. We had a fish fry here a couple of weeks ago. They'd been in about a year and a half in one of these cages and they're suspended with 4 or 5 foot of water under them and then was the best catfish I'd ever had. They wasn't strong. They was clean you know. They ate commercial food. They wasn't on the bottom you couldn't beat them. You know they was as good as anything you'd get in a restaurant. Now this is part of our setup back to our load of bluegill here. In February we went to Nebraska City. We got asked to put this on. Went to the Laird Lodge up there. It was beautiful. We did about the same thing. We started redoing our prawn ponds. We learned this in our meeting. They said to put this substrate up. And they can say whatever it wants. All it is is plastic construction fence. It depends what degree you got what you call it. You know. We went to Home Depot and bought it. Some steel post. And basically what this does, when the prawns go to quarantine, they lose their shells. So they need some place to go because everything's cannibalistic. They'll eat each other. They eat whatever is there. They can get up on this fence and get away. And it actually likes doubles or triples your square feet of your pond. We went into putting, we put 8,000 in here. But that pond actually turned, it's a half acre pond actually turned into darn it at one acre pond by putting his fence in. Because that give us more room for them to go. So anyway, that's what we did. We put it in the bottom. We did two ponds this year. We did a little one. We're experimenting with one. We have no aeration in it, a quarter acre pond with no aeration. This is still our half acre pond with all of our money in it. So that was a day's project. We hired Dima lay boys. They come out and they helped us. I think I hit something. I don't know, I did something here. She locked. Anyway, the Dima lay boys, they're a deal from the, is it Masons? They're the young kids' group of the Masons. And they are real good. They come out and we need some help catching fish and stuff. They're a lot of fun. They're good kids. We have a lot of fun water fights and the whole deal. But they're a good bunch of kids to help. And so they help us quite a little bit when we need it. So anyway, that was it. In June, we went down and we picked up our prawn. This year, I bought 11,000. They weigh these guys up in grams. We took us duly down there and all on and on. I come home with eight pounds. There's got to be a way. You can't put these in a cooler, you know. But you got to have it for the aeration. We got them divided up and we just took another old feed bunk and made a shoot. We just backed up to the ponds and we got two sides. We put 8,000 in the big pond. There's a picture of a Mary which Mary had to, she had her camera extended out but they're just basically transparent. The only thing you can see is this little dot in her eyes. If you pick them up, that's about all you can see. Like I said, there was 11,000 and they weighed 8 pounds when they put them in. This was our little pond we did in September, which is another old feed bunk. That's where they're coming out there. We had a lot better turnout. This is one here. We got this one at home in a picture. Well, a fact part of his claws are cut off there. I don't even show them. That's a female there. The other one was a male with a big blue. Yeah, this is a male here. These guys come out this year right around the 12, per pound and Russ comes up from the school and we let him do the way. We don't weigh him. He comes and helps us, but we want his figures. Here's some of the DMA lay boys. They helped the day of the harvest, just whatever. They actually got to go down and pick them up out of the mud leftovers. This is Barney Fisher. He's our state representative. He come up, spent most of the day with us. This is some of what we do because we have to sell our stuff live, not processed. We get in all the state regulations and stuff. So what we do, we sell them live. We got a three compartment sink. There's like four or five of the guys here. We weigh them up. You pay for them. If you want them clean, wonderful. There's a tip jar there and we'll clean them or you can come over and clean them. But long as they're yours and you either ask us to clean them or you clean them, it's, everything's fine. But we cannot charge, you know, or we cannot clean them then we sell them. Long as you buy them live and pay for them, it works. That suits went to the health department and I don't know who all we got that from. So we went to Kansas City. It's a used restaurant deal and we bought these sinks and some stainless steel tables. We started another pond since we got done. It's another half acre pond. We're going to stay with it. It is working. This year alone we've sold in between $12,000 and $14,000 with a bluegill and we ain't even halfway through our first crop. They're just, everything we did is at least a two year cycle. When we started it we got kind of storied to how it's going to be a year a little over. Well that got us in trouble with the bank and every place else it didn't work. Two years into it we can see it is working. We ain't touched our bass yet. We've got an order for them in December and January to go to Illinois for part of them what we're turning loose. We've had bass all the way up to out, no the bluegills been in Outuna Iowa been down in Springfield. We've had a deal in bass at Bartle Hall from Ranger Boat. They come and got some for display up here. So it is working. It's just taking some time. We are building another pond getting it started. So we was hoping to get two put in this year but it probably ain't going to work. We had to shut down and we had to go back to the field. We're still, we were supposed to be in here yesterday but we was cutting silage. That was a picture last Sunday. I was mowing corn last Sunday and this is what it was. It's volunteer corn. So that's where we was at yesterday instead of up here. We're still chopping silage. This is one of Mary's projects here. She raises boxers on the side also. That's one of her leaders last year. They fit in real good with everything else we do. So it's beef boxers of bluegill just come and see us. That's basically what we do. What's your marketing on the bluegill? I'm a little confused. Pardon me. What's your marketing on the bluegill? Are you selling all of them live and who are you selling them to? Most of them so far has been to the kids fishing tournaments. With Russ Gerlock, he's helping us broker them out of Jeff City so far. We cannot sell well, if you wanted to buy them as food, yes, you know, we can. But so far they haven't. They went to kids fishing tournaments because there ain't nothing any funner to catch in a big bluegill on a little rod and reel. Is there anything better to eat or something else, boys? Oh, no. I love them but I know what we can get out of them so we don't eat very many of them. That's pretty well what we do. If anybody would be interested in coming over some time we're pretty proud of what we're doing because it is working. Where's Butler? Straight south of Kansas City on 71. We're about 50 miles south of Kansas City just right there. So that's pretty well our story.