Land use in shrimp aquaculture includes production and support area on shrimp farms. Agricultural land also is needed to produce shrimp feed ingredients and to provide carbohydrate sources for super-intensive culture ponds. The total shrimp farm area averaged 1.79 times production water surface area at intensive farms in Asia. Land use for shrimp feed ingredients averaged 0.310 ha/m.t. feed. Land use for carbohydrates often used in super-intensive culture was 0.133 ha/m.t. of sugar or molasses. The carbohydrate input may be 50-100% of the feed input. This would increase land use in super-intensive culture, but for now, most shrimp are produced intensively without carbohydrate addition. The total land use for shrimp culture in ponds decreased from around 4 ha/m.t. shrimp/yr in extensive culture to less than 0.5 ha/t in intensive culture. Ingredients alone require 0.25-0.4 ha/m.t. of shrimp feed, and the actual land use for feed is dependent upon the farm FCR. There is no appreciable reduction of land use per metric ton of shrimp at production intensity beyond 15-20 m.t./ha/yr. Thus, there is no land use justification for complex super-intensive production systems.
At present, shrimp farming has a global production area of about 2,440,000 ha and a total shrimp farm area of 3,660,000 ha. An additional 1,860,000 ha are cultivated for soybean and other plant meal feed ingredients. The average yield of shrimp is 2.12 m.t/ha production pond surface area/yr, 1.42 m.t./ha shrimp farm area/yr, or 0.94 m.t./ha total land area/yr. It requires an average of 1.06 ha of total land to produce 1 m.t. of shrimp per year. However, roughly 50% of the shrimp farm area is extensive and produces only 10% of shrimp. The efficiency of land use in shrimp aquaculture could be greatly improved by dissuading extensive shrimp production.