June 7th, 2008
Shane Stelly is one of James’s ultralight students. He’s learning to fly an ultralight for business – his family owns Stelly Farms, part of which is an alligator farm. They raise and skin anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 alligators each year. The process starts with finding the alligator nests, which had previously been done by airboats or helicopters. Both methods are noisy and expensive; he said the airboats were always in for repairs, and the helicopters are quite expensive. So, buying and learning to fly an ultralight is a good alternative. Shane had asked James to teach him how to fly, and we met Shane at the airfield our first afternoon. I started chatting with Shane, trying to find out what he did, and I was absolutely fascinated hearing about the gator farm. I really, really wanted to go see it!
Much to our great luck, James also wanted to see the gator farm, so he swung by the airfield with Beth on Friday to take us out near Freshwater Bayou, where the farm is. We only made it to Abbeville before James had truck trouble, so Beth and Chelsea and I killed an hour or more in McDonalds, enjoying the air conditioning. We never made it that day, but James came by again the next day and we headed out through the countryside to take our tour.
What an intense experience it was! We were all flabbergasted by how big and efficient the operation is, and by how much is involved.
First, they’ve got to find the nests and mark them, then go back and collect the eggs, often fighting off an angry mama alligator (they can easily collect 2,000 to 3,000 eggs per day).
They’ve got to get the eggs back to the farm safely (the eggs can’t be bounced or turned), and get them incubated for 63 days. The hatchlings are then put into pens, 200 per pen, 8 pens per building, where they are fed a specially made dog food, 96% protein, to enhance the growth.
After a growth period of 10-18 months, the alligators have grown to 3 or 4 feet, and it’s time to kill and skin them. Any longer than this time period, and there’s more chance for scars from fighting, and health issues to develop. The scars greatly reduce the value of the gator hide.
During the skinning period it’s common to work 18-hour days, just skinning. There are so many gators to get through, that they will skin 3-4,000 or more per month. At this point, Shane said they are skinning up to 10 months a year!
The alligators are sold for both their meat and their hides. Alligator meat is quite tasty, very similar to chicken, with a texture like pork (Chelsea and I have already had alligator meat twice), and has a greater protein count per ounce than other meats, as well as being lower in cholesterol and fat. The hides are graded by quality, and sent off to tanners.
The alligator farms are regarded favorably by most environmentalists, as the wetlands owners are paid per egg, and therefore have incentives to keep the land healthy, which in turn benefits all other wildlife. The farms also have no negative impact on the local environment, requiring little land and water.
The cost to be in the business is amazing. Shane estimated that it takes an upfront investment of $1 million to get the alligators from eggs through skinning. There’s constant repair going on – wood rotting, pipes breaking; they have 7 water wells to manage the gator sheds; it takes 50,000 gallons of diesel to heat the boilers for the water in the sheds; costs $20,000 a week in food – 22 tons a week; they need generators to run the operation when the electricity goes out; and the list goes on.
In addition to the alligator farm, Shane’s family has 7,000 crawfish cages; 500 acres of crawfish; 800 head of cattle; and fields of rice that are grown for the crawfish (when I have a chance, I’ll write more about how crawfish are farmed).
Shane told us that the water from the sheds, when they wash down the alligator pens every other day, is sent out to a drainage area. They use the remains (dried alligator poop) as fertilizer for their rice fields, cutting back their need for fertilizer by 200-300 pounds. He told us that the rice fertilized by this method got so heavy it fell down!
Another impressive thing to note is Shane’s quiet but obvious business expertise. As James Thibodeaux put it, the market tells Shane what price he’ll get, so all Shane can do to improve his bottom line is to improve his operations. He’s constantly looking to improve ways of managing and always looking for innovations, like eliminating corners in the sheds so the alligators fight less, improving the draining so it takes less time, reducing the number of alligators per pen.
James pointed out that Shane’s got good people skills. “He’s got 10 people out there doing the work of 30. You can’t force people to do that anymore; they have to be willing to do it.” That’s James’s idea of diplomacy, “letting people do things your way, instead of making them do it your way; then their heart’s not in it, and you have to figure out a way to keep them around longer. So in a nutshell, Shane is an engineer, he’s an architect, he’s a contractor, he’s a carpenter, he’s a mechanic, he’s a marketing specialist, and the list goes on and on and on.”
This visit was truly an experience we won’t ever forget. From that first initial wild thrashing sound as Shane opened the door, and that overwhelming, very distinctive, pungent, gamey smell, to the sight of hundreds of little red beady eyes checking us out, and those hundreds of slithery little bodies in the water, to the sight of the salted rows of skins ready to be shipped, we were amazed and impressed. I will never look at a pair of gator-skin boots or an alligator wallet the same way again!