Turtle farming is the practice of raising turtles and tortoises of various species commercially. Raised animals are sold for use as gourmet food, traditional medicine ingredients, or as pets. Some farms also sell young animals to other farms, either as breeding stock, or more commonly to be raised there to a larger size for subsequent resale.
Turtle farms primarily raise freshwater turtles (primarily, Chinese softshell turtles as a food source and sliders and cooter turtles for the pet trade); therefore, turtle farming is usually classified as aquaculture. However, some terrestrial tortoises (e.g. Cuora mouhotii) are also raised on farms for the pet trade.
Only three serious attempts are believed to have been made to farm sea turtles. Only one of them, in Cayman Islands, continues to operate. The one in Australia's Torres Strait Islands folded after a few years of operation, and the one in Réunion has been converted to a public aquarium (Kélonia).
Geography
Japan
Japan is said to be the pioneer of softshelled turtle (Pelodiscus sinensis) farming, with the first farm started by Kurajiro Hatori in Fukagawa near Tokyo in 1866. Initially stocked with wild-caught animals, the farm started breeding them in 1875. By the early 20th century, Hattori's farm had about 13.6 hectares of turtle ponds; it was reported to produce 82,000 eggs in 1904, and 60,000 animals of market size in 1907.
According to the report of the Japanese zoologist Kakichi Mitsukuri, who conducted a significant amount of research at Hattori's farm in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the main food supplied to the turtles was crushed bivalve mollusks, Mactra veneriformis (シオフキガイ, shiofuki, in Japanese), from Tokyo Bay. This was supplemented with byproducts of fish processing and sericulture, as well as boiled wheat. The farm turtles lived in a symbiotic relationship with carp and eels, which were raised in the same ponds. The fish stirred up the mud, and the shy turtles felt more comfortable foraging in turbid water.
Hattori's company has survived into the 21st century, as the Hattori-Nakamura Soft-Shelled Turtle Farm, operating in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture. According to a 1991 report, Japan's turtle farm industry continued to be mostly based in central Japan, but was expanding to the warmer southern parts of the country.
China
The majority of world's turtle farms are probably located in China.
Ancient Chinese literature (Fan Li's The Art of Fish-Breeding, 5th century BCE) contains references to keeping softshell turtles in fish ponds to control fish stocking density.
According to a study published in 2007, over a thousand turtle farms operated in China. A later report by the same team (Shi Haitao, James F. Parham, et al.), published in January 2008, was based on an attempt to survey all 1,499 turtle farms that were registered with the appropriate authorities of the People's Republic of China (namely, the Endangered Species Import and Export Management Office, and the Forestry Bureaus of individual provinces). The farms were mostly located in China's southern provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, and Hunan, although more recent sources indicate Zhejiang as particularly important. Some of the farms have been operating since the 1980s, the industry steadily growing since.
According to the responses obtained from 684 of those farms, they had a total of than 300 million animals, and sold over 128 million turtles each year, with the total weight of about 93,000 tons. Extrapolating from this sample, the researchers estimated that about 300 million farm-raised turtles are sold annually by China's registered turtle farms, worth (presumably, at the wholesale prices) around US$750 million. They note that a large number of unregistered farms also exist.
According to more recent Chinese statistics, annual production just of Chinese softshelled turtle amounted to 204,000 tons in 2008.