A pioneer in freshwater prawn seed production

A cooperative's shift in direction

That man is Bui Van Luong, Director of the Van Phong Youth Aquaculture Cooperative in Nho Quan commune, Ninh Binh province, the first in the region to build a facility producing freshwater prawn seed.

Alongside two ponds for raising market-size prawns, his farm now includes a row of newly built sheds for seed production, set right along the bank. Day and night, the hum of oxygen aerators drifts out from inside. Luong scoops a few larvae from a tank with a net and pours them into a basin to show me - hundreds, thousands of tiny prawn larvae, smaller even than mosquitoes, clinging thickly to the sides of the basin.

His cooperative has 18 members farming 20 hectares of water surface along the banks of the Hoang Long River. They previously stocked traditional fish species such as grass carp, silver carp, bighead carp, and common carp, but eventually found the investment too large relative to the returns and gradually shifted to freshwater prawns instead.

With just over 1 hectare of ponds, Luong calculates that of his six years in aquaculture, more than four were spent raising fish, investing roughly 1.4 billion dong a year but earning only about 150 million dong in profit, with feed accounting for 80 percent of costs and the rest going to fingerlings, electricity, and medicine. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that raising fish is like running a feed-production factory. By contrast, in just over a year of raising freshwater prawns, his investment was far smaller while profits came close to matching four full years of fish farming.

In early 2025, Luong purchased 300,000 post-larvae (larvae that have developed all their body parts) to nurse, selling 350 kilograms of prawn seed to local farmers for over 100 million dong. He stocked the rest in his own ponds, and by the end of the season harvested 2.5 tons of market-size prawns worth over 400 million dong. For that single crop, his total revenue came to more than 500 million dong against costs of only 180 million dong, for a profit of over 320 million dong. Encouraged by the result, he is now experimenting with overwintering prawns. They are currently growing well, and he expects to know the full results once he sells them in roughly two months.

"Why is raising freshwater prawns so profitable for me? Because I make use of homemade feed from trash fish, corn meal, and rice bran. When the prawns are still small I feed them industrial feed, but from three months old onward I switch to feed that is 90 percent homemade. At first it had to be ground and cooked, but soon I'll use a pellet press and feed it raw," Luong explained.

While raising freshwater prawns and offering related services on the side, Luong noticed that demand for prawn seed among Nho Quan farmers was substantial. What's more, prawn seed shipped from the south over such long distances tends to weaken along the way, resulting in high loss rates, so he decided to invest in producing seed locally instead. No sooner had he thought of it than he acted: in late 2025 he built eight tanks inside an enclosed building and purchased an oxygen-generating system, for a total investment of 300 million dong.

A day at the hatchery

Dang Thanh Hoang, a technician from Hai Tu Freshwater Prawn Seed Production Company (Lap Vo commune, Dong Thap province), has been living and working at the Van Phong Youth Aquaculture Cooperative for two weeks straight to help Luong through the initial transfer of the technical process.

"Our company breeds broodstock prawns, then raises them from larvae to post-larvae, selling at either stage depending on customer needs," Hoang said. "Weather in the south is more favorable for prawn seed production, since water is readily available and the climate is hot year-round, so hatching artemia [a type of crustacean used as feed for prawn larvae] takes just 12 hours. Up north, during this season, hatching takes more than 30 hours, and prawn larvae also grow considerably more slowly. On top of that, equipment for the prawn seed industry isn't readily available in the north, so a lot of it has to be shipped up from the south."

Hoang's daily routine runs like clockwork: feeding the larvae at 6:30 a.m., cleaning tanks and equipment, checking at 8:30 a.m. whether feed remains in the tanks, feeding again at 12:30 p.m., then checking feed levels again at 2:30 and 4:30 p.m. If artemia is left uneaten, it grows larger, develops bristles, and damages water quality. Once the larvae mature into post-larvae, an additional late-night feeding is required.

Saltwater trucked in from the sea is used to nurse the prawn larvae, which develop into post-larvae after about 30 days. During this stage, technicians must gradually reduce the salinity from 12 parts per thousand down to 5 parts per thousand so the post-larvae can later be released into the freshwater ponds where farmers will raise them to market size.

Using specialized techniques, producers can achieve a ratio of more than 90 percent male prawns, since males grow considerably faster than females when farmed. From 350 grams of larvae, if successful, the cooperative can produce 5 million post-larvae, enough to supply 50 hectares of farming area.

Le Nhu Quynh, the agricultural officer for Nho Quan commune and also a freshwater prawn farmer himself, said the trade in his area is currently generating profit margins around 50 percent, meaning that for every 2 tons sold, 1 ton is pure profit. Traditional fish farming, he said, can never come close to that rate of return.

"Raising fish is a good way to lose the farm - the investment is large, losses are frequent, disease is rampant, and you have to rebuild the pond banks every two to three years because the fish damage them. Freshwater prawns, on the other hand, are far less prone to disease and can make good use of natural feed sources, keeping feed costs fairly low, while seed prices aren't high either.

The most important thing is managing the prawn population well during the first month after stocking, to avoid losses. If the Van Phong Youth Aquaculture Cooperative succeeds in producing prawn seed, Nho Quan will gain control over part of its input supply, cutting both costs and losses," Quynh said.

Quynh also noted that in the early days of prawn farming, selling the product was far from easy. Seeing that freshwater prawns have large heads and short bodies, people would buy them to try, discard the heads entirely thinking they contained waste matter, and eat only the body, then complain there wasn't much meat. But over time, the more people ate them, the more they came to like them, since freshwater prawn meat is firm and sweet, second only to tiger prawn, while the roe, concentrated in the head, is rich and creamy, every bit as good as crab roe.

The old Nho Quan district has more than 3,000 hectares of low-lying land planted with a single rice crop a year, along with thousands of hectares of ponds dedicated to aquaculture. In recent years, alongside traditional fish species, many farmers have shifted to raising freshwater prawns, with the trend especially concentrated in Thanh Son commune.

$ 1 = VND 26,480 - Source: Vietcombank.