Hey everybody! My hobby started in high school in 2003, but my interest in the world of culturing aquatic animals started much earlier. Closer to my 5th birthday. July 4th 1991 when I told my Aunt Dawn I wanted to be a fish farmer. I pursued this with a passion, including riding my bike 4 miles after school to clean algae from ponds at a local trout farm in middle school. I did some water garden installation in high school and sold pond supplies online. I designed and built my first aquaculture system my junior year of high school, I built a few hundred gallon system for growing Tilapia that I was doing fin clipping experiments on for biology class. I started my first reef tank about this time. A 55gallon mixed reef with 2 x150w metal halides. After high school I headed to Indian River State College and graduated with a degree in Agricultural Production with a Specialization in Aquaculture. After college I worked for a shrimp farm starting as a hatchery tech and moving up until I was designing and constructing many of the new projects on the farm. It was an R&D facility for intensive shrimp culture. We stumbled across breakpoint bromination by accident and built a system that successfully treated 10,000 gallons a day of larval shrimp effluent back to pristine saltwater. Once the investor left due to age and health reasons a few us partnered and got into sunray venus clams. Operating the only purge/wet storage system in the country that I was aware of at the time. Holding food clams for a full purge before shipping around the country. Red tide rolled in and we couldn’t harvest clams to purge or sell for months. I moved on to Proaquatix, starting as a delivery driver, working my way through warehouse manager, and then finally becoming the project manager for the new building I built about a decade ago. Check out the facility https://www.proaquatix.com/our-story/ I did the site work and built most of this building and the majority of systems it contains. The new Growout was based on some older systems with a new filtration system I designed. The broodstock was my original design but lots of valves to tap! With the facility finished I moved to Oregon to pursue beekeeping and ran 600-800 hives for a number of years. Through an acquaintance I got into commercial waterproofing and am now the Operations Manager of a medium size construction company. I got back into the hobby this spring and am excited how far the hobby has come. Currently running SmatFarm G6 lighting over my Innovative Marine 20 AIO with Hydros controllers.
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