- Meta: Cement-pond shrimp farming under cover: 11-15 kW blower per 1,000 m3, air stones or nano tubing, 400 fry per m2, two to three crops a year.
Cement-pond shrimp farming — "small water body + concrete tank + greenhouse or hoop house" — is spreading quickly along China's coast because it reuses existing infrastructure: factory fish tanks, sea-cucumber and abalone ponds, or shrimp hatchery tanks. The model is intensive, so the aeration and water treatment rules below are not optional.
Cement-pond culture: the numbers that work
Aeration capacity. Install enough oxygenation for the whole water volume: at least 11-15 kW of blower power per 1,000 m³ of water, which works out to 8-10 W of oxygen supply per cubic metre. Diffuse it with 3-5 air stones per square metre or 0.5-0.8 m of nano (microporous) tubing per square metre. Keep dissolved oxygen above 5 mg/L throughout the crop, exchange a modest amount of water daily and purge sludge daily.
Tank size and stocking. Cement tanks are typically 20-60 m². Stock about 400 post-larvae per square metre. The density is deliberately high enough to push shrimp to grow fast and harvest early — short crops cut risk.
Crop cycle. Depending on local climate and facilities, farmers run two to three crops per year, which is where the economics of cement-pond culture beat a single seasonal pond crop.
Beyond cement ponds: closed recirculating systems
Traditional open shrimp farming discharges increasing volumes of effluent and is no longer acceptable where environmental rules tighten. A closed recirculating aquaculture system (RAS) reuses its water through a treatment loop:
source water → storage → filtration and disinfection → shrimp tanks → waste-sediment tank → biological purification (aquatic-plant channel) → filtration → microbial decomposition → back to the shrimp tanks
RAS brings high density, independence from regional climate, efficient resource use, safer premium product, fewer disease outbreaks and minimal pollution — the direction sustainable shrimp farming is moving.
Fully controlled (factory) recirculating shrimp farming
The most advanced form treats the tank environment as an industrial process: industrial means control the ecology inside the tanks to create optimum conditions, stock at high density, feed high-quality diets and maximise yield and quality per square metre. It is a high-investment, high-output model. The system consists of the shrimp tanks plus disinfection, water filtration, aeration and temperature-control units. Wastewater passes through settling, filtration, removal of soluble harmful compounds and disinfection, then is re-conditioned — temperature, pH, oxygen and a top-up of fresh water — and returned to the tanks in a closed loop.
No single design fits every site: the efficient, economical and practical system has to be developed from local conditions and accumulated experience. For aeration equipment matched to cement-pond or RAS shrimp farming — roots blowers, air stones and nano tubing sized to your water volume — contact us with your tank dimensions and target stocking density. For the biology-driven design of fully recirculating vannamei systems, see vannamei factory recirculating farming, or the greenhouse (non-recirculating) high-density guide if you run covered ponds.
