Originally Posted by
Wayne Kerr
[MORE TO COME AFTER DINNER]
That took a little longer than I thought ... catching up with old mates and all that
Anyway, back to the road ...
The Lizard Farms - Nha Trang, Vietnam
My mate runs a small seafood company in southern Vietnam and his fishermen collect lobsters and abalone from the nearshore reefs. The idea for the lizard farms came about when his staff complained they weren’t making enough money, so he built each of them a small plot to farm lizards for sale to a few restaurants in Saigon, Hanoi and Guangzhou. It has been so successful the fishermen can’t be arsed to go fishing anymore and everyone is making a decent little profit along the way.
The critters breed like rabbits, have next to no smell or disease, can be stocked at very high densities (about 1000 in a small 20 sq.m pen), and they fetch about US$18 a kilo at the farm gate. They grow to the size shown in the pics in about 3 months and the commune I visited had 23 pens, which on average produced 20,000 lizards per quarter (or about $30,000 if they sell them at a size of 12 lizards to the kilo). Not a bad little earner for all concerned especially considering they feed them vegetable scraps and the sand for their burrows is collected from the floodplain nearby.
^ A typical lizard pen … the sand is about 1 metre deep which provides plenty of room for the lizards to burrow into
^ The farmer and his boy get in and chase the things around all day
^ Not my idea of good working conditions but I guess it aint any harder than walking around on reef flats all day looking for abalone
^ The farmer was well proud of his babies
^ They bung them in small cages like this for live transport to the restaurants … they are simply grilled whole on a barbecue and taste like a cross between chicken and fish