"Since I was a little kid, I was involved in tobacco. My grandfather and father both raised it, and I had my own crop in high school," says Moreland fondly, before shrugging. "But once the buyout came, I got tired of fooling with it."
It's a cold April morning in Kentucky tobacco country, and Moreland is heading two hours south to collect 40,000 prawn hatchlings, which he hopes will grow through the summer into a bumper harvest of 1,700 pounds of genuine Kentucky seafood.
Like many small farmers in this state famous for bourbon, thoroughbred horses and a good cigar, Moreland found himself without a tobacco crop in 2004, when Congress eliminated the quota system that had sustained generations of farmers.
Source: Reuters
Shrimpers in Kentucky? Sounds like a fish tale
KENTUCKY - Some 125 Kentucky farmers raise fish or prawns, according to Angela Caporelli, aquaculture coordinator at the Kentucky Department of Agriculture. While that's just a fraction of Kentucky's 84,000 farms, the fact that the state even has an aquaculture coordinator surprises many.