"The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers maintains more than 400 ports and more than 25,000 miles of coastal and inland waterways. Many harbors and navigation channels silt up and require maintenance dredging to be kept open. Estimates of the amount of sediment dredged by the Corps of Engineers range from 300-400 million cubic yards annually. Disposal in dredged material containment areas (DMCAs) suits the needs of many dredging projects. On the national level, an estimated 7,000 acres of new DMCAs are needed annually. In many parts of the country, finding and acquiring suitable sites is difficult. Research by the Corps of Engineers identified aquaculture as a potential beneficial use of containment areas. By designing and operating a DMCA for both material placement and aquaculture, benefits could be realized by the landowner, the aquaculture industry, local port and waterway authorities, and the Corps of Engineers. The focus of this report is an introduction to aquacultural economics as it pertains to dredged material containment areas"--National Sea Grant Library publication website

High land and construction costs hinder development of pond-based aquaculture in the United States. A partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) may reduce these constraints. The dredged material containment areas (DMCA) operated by the USACE are structurally similar to aquaculture ponds and typically are used by the USACE only once every 3 to 10 years. With the Corps and navigational interests contributing to dike construction and land acquisition, the costs of aquaculture may be reduced while providing the Corps with the additional disposal areas needed to maintain our nation's waterways. The Containment Area Aquaculture Program (CAAP) was established to investigate the feasibility of DMCA aquaculture from biological, economic, engineering, and legal perspectives. The technical feasibility of DMCA's was demonstrated in 42- and 47-ha DMCA's near Brownsville, TX. Pumps, filters, and drainage structures were added to these DMCA's to accommodate aquaculture operations and a 1.6-ha nursery pond was constructed. During a 3-year period, four crops of penaeid shrimp were raised. Production rates averaged 670 kg/ha of whole shrimp (range: 338 to 1,143 kg/ha) with 51 percent survival (range: 23 percent to 74 percent). Total production for the four crops was 116,088 kg of whole shrimp (71,878 k tails), and this was sold for over $475,000.

The view that active dredged material containment areas (DMCA) are unproductive, commercially unusable, and incompatible with local needs can be challenged by demonstrating that there are situations where dredged material and DMCA's can be used to create positive benefits. One example would be a profitable and biologically productive use of disposal acreage for aquaculture. A 2 day workshop on aquaculture in DMCA's held in Galveston, Tex., in September 1982 attended by representatives from the Corps, other Federal and State agencies, private industry, and academia, examined issues affecting the technical, economic, and practical use of DMCA's for aquaculture ...