The provincial fisheries center of Tuyen Quang province in northern Vietnam has, since the start of the year, produced more than 50,000 artificial seed of the premium river fish ca chien. Ca chien is a large catfish relative living in the Red River system, a fish that commands a high price for its firm flesh and rarity. Until now the juveniles for farming relied on catching from the river, but the production of those juveniles is becoming possible to run within the region. For Japanese seafood buyers who hold stable raw material as a challenge, it is worth reading as a move in which the region's \"upstream\" changes.<\/p>\n
The Tuyen Quang provincial fisheries center produced more than 50,000 ca chien juveniles through artificial breeding from January to the end of July 2026. The center's annual production capacity is expected to exceed 100,000 for ca chien alone, and counting various juveniles such as carp, grass carp and white catfish together, it raises 40.2 million a year, of which it ships 31.8 million. Ca chien was long held to be \"a fish that cannot be bred artificially,\" and after repeated failures it finally reached the point where everything from egg collection to raising juveniles can be done end to end.<\/p>\n
Ca chien is a native species that has been called \"the lord of the river\" and \"the fish offered to the king (ca tien vua)\" in the Song Lo (the Lo River) basin, a rare fish listed in Vietnam's Red Data Book. Raised over 1.5 to 2 years in net pens to 1.5 to 2 kg, its regional trading price reaches 500,000 to 600,000 dong per kg (about 2,900 to 3,500 yen, a rough estimate at about 170 dong to the yen). The problem was where the juveniles came from. The method of catching wild juveniles from the river and putting them in net pens reduced wild individuals the more it caught, and with deteriorating spawning grounds it thinned year by year. The structure of relying on the wild for seed overlaps with the challenge once faced by the loach hatchery in Quang Tri province<\/a>, which advanced juvenile production without relying on other provinces.<\/p>\n Whether juveniles can be raised artificially and stably governs the economics of net-pen farming at its root. As long as it relies on catching from the wild, the number of juveniles that can be stocked is bound by the river's state and the hit-or-miss of the catch, making both shipment volume and price hard to read. If juveniles can be supplied in a planned way within the region, farmers find it easier to work backward: \"stock this many, and that many kilograms come out in this many years.\" Because net-pen farming on the Lo River has carried the uncertainty of damage from typhoons and flooding, separating the upstream juveniles from the weather has large meaning. The structure in which seed quality improvement decides the degree of supply stability, like the one that governs shrimp supply to Japan, Kona Bay's seed improvement<\/a>, is on the same evaluation axis.<\/p>\nHolding the seed in the region separates net-pen farming's raw material from weather and catch volume<\/h2>\n