MONAVILLE, Texas -- Out here on the fertile prairie west of Houston, the coming summer holds the promise of something beyond its usual bounty of tall corn, fat watermelons and sleek cattle.
Signs are that 1999 will be a banner year for eels, too.
You heard right, pardner: eels, those slimy, snaky fish chiefly known for lurking in coral reefs and providing skins for belts and wallets.
It so happens that the freshwater variety, which do their lurking in rivers and ponds, are eminently edible and much in demand in certain markets. To serve those markets, a fast-growing Chinese company called Longshan Group is out to make Waller County the eel capital of Texas.
Eels might not seem like a natural fit for a county where most of the water is found in stock tanks or irrigation ditches, and marine life generally means crawfish, turtles and frogs. But Longshan, whose eel ranch is about 50 miles west of Houston, halfway between Brookshire and Hempstead, has been raising blue eels at the location since 1997 for sale to Asian restaurants and supermarkets from Houston to New York City.
Doing business in this country as Longshan USA, the company recently acquired a facility near Katy where tiny inch-long baby eels are being nurtured.
In addition, by month's end Longshan expects to fire up the ovens at its new processing plant in Hempstead, where filleted eel will be steamed or broiled, packaged and shipped across the country.
'Harvesting' the eels
Longshan is finishing what amounts to its start-up phase, during which it acquired a production site, dug and filled ponds, and raised and marketed its initial -- herds? crops? schools? -- of eel.
"The term is 'harvests,' " explains Christina Lynn Koo, Longshan's chief financial officer. When the 6-inch fingerlings get to 1 1/2 to 2 pounds, or about 18 inches long, "we harvest them by seining the ponds. We've already had a number of harvests."
A baby eel reaches market size in a year to 18 months, during which it spends its time idling in the muddy water and grazing on the gelatinous glop of fish meal and potato starch dumped at water's edge each day.
The budding eels' only worry comes from above, says general manager Jim Meader. "The herons and cormorants manage to get a bunch of 'em."
Left alone and fed regularly, these eels would grow to 10 pounds or more, but by then they would be up to 3 feet long, too awkward to net and handle, and too tough for customers' tastes.
The seining and culling, which assigns market-size eels to holding tanks and sends the rest back to the ponds, is a never-ending chore. Each of the 40 eel ponds on the Longshan site is seined twice monthly.
The task involves first stretching a 20-by-400-foot net along two sides of the two-acre pond. Then, with the help of workers in the water and tractors on the levees, the net is guided slowly across to the opposite corner, where the now-compressed net is filled with a roiling, writhing mass of eels.
The workers move the eels into tank-trailers, using hand-held basket nets, and trundle them over to the sorting table and holding tanks.
Get a grip
The eels are a handful. Or rather, they're not: Smooth and slippery as, well, eels, they squirm out of all but the most firm handholds. On the plus side, their skins, which are similar to those of catfish, are tough and durable, and they have no teeth or spiny fins.
Eels sorted for shipment are put in plastic bags with ice, boxed, then trucked away, usually to Houston's Bush Intercontinental Airport, in a cold-induced stupor. Eels survive unusually well in very little water, and there's no fresher product than one still alive when it arrives.
The process -- "very labor-intensive," Koo admits -- was imported from China, where eel-raising is a huge industry. The pilot project here has been modeled after its Chinese counterparts.
"That even included the construction of the ponds," says Koo. "A man from China was brought in to supervise the earth-moving, and he relied on his mental picture of the ponds back home to determine the size and banking. The 'blueprint' for everything was in his head."
Meader says the "old country" approach resulted in a few problems, such as misaligned levees, but just about any difficulty can be fixed as the operation matures.
A self-described jack-of-all-trades who until recently managed an area fish farm, Meader, 50, is plotting improvements for the Longshan operation. He wants to automate the tedious seining and sorting process. "It just takes way too long," he says.
Back at the ranch
Nevertheless, there's no arguing with success, and the Monaville eel ranch has been that. "I've had to reinvent the wheel for a lot of our business side, but things are coming together," says Koo. "Our sales are up. We're expanding."
Koo came into the eel business by way of her father, Carlos Koo, a California businessman who became lead investor in Longshan's new U.S. project through friends with the company in China.
The Chinese wanted a foothold in the U.S. market because they were concerned about possible over-reliance on Japanese buyers.
Father tapped 26-year-old daughter, who has a master's degree in economics from the University of California at Davis, to oversee the project. With no agricultural experience, she concedes she felt a little overwhelmed.
"But it seemed like an adventure, and my dad needed someone he could trust. So here I am."
Pub Date: 3/14/99