It’s not commonly known that most fish you buy in the store are not wild-caught, but farm-raised. Yes, people do farm fish. There is an old apocryphal story about a game warden walking along a riverbank who encounters a fellow with a rod and reel in hand and a bucket full of water at his side; in the bucket are several fish, swimming around. The game warden asks to see the angler’s fishing license.
“Why would I need a license?” the man asks. “These are farmed fish. I’m a fish farmer. The fish need exercise to be really tasty, so every day I bring a few down and let them swim in the river for a while. I have them trained so that when I whistle, they swim back, jump in the bucket, and I take them back.”
“I need to see this for myself,” the game warden answers. “Otherwise I have to ticket you for taking these fish without a license.”
So the man dumps the bucket of fish in the water, and they swim away. A few moments pass and the game warden says, “All right, let’s see you whistle those fish back.”
The man replies, “What fish?”
Now as it happens, Alabama catfish farmers, far from having trouble exercising their fish, are having problems with them getting too large – and Auburn University’s fisheries department is stepping in to offer aid.
Catfish are farmed both on small, family-owned farms and in large-scale operations focused on the consumer market. Currently, the industry is battling the problem of fish that are growing too large, too fast, and that’s where Auburn University is stepping in to lend a hand.
“These fish weigh around 20 pounds,” said Larry Lawson, director of the Research and Extension Center in the School of Fisheries, Aquaculture & Aquatic Sciences. “You’ve got them consuming the smaller fish and eating your feed, and they’re worth nothing when you send them to the processing plant. This is a major issue; our farms are losing a lot of money.”
Auburn University has two facilities on opposite sides of the state that are equipped to help catfish farmers through research and outreach.
It’s great that Auburn isn’t koi about helping. Farmers operate on small margins much of the time, and anything that makes their operation less efficient is not good.
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What’s interesting about all this is that the fish are actually too big; that, in a lifetime of angling, has to be the first time I’ve ever heard of that complaint. Usually, it’s fish that are too small that is the concern, and in some waters where there are minimum sizes one is allowed to keep, it requires measuring every fish caught. That can be a real haddock.
It seems, though, that the problem isn’t just big fish – it’s losing money on extra feed and processing hassles.
Many farmers are raising a blue catfish and channel catfish hybrid, which makes up half of all catfish harvested in the U.S., so the problems surrounding their rapid growth are widespread. Both small- and large-scale farmers aim to harvest fish that are “market size,” between 1 and 1.25 and 4 pounds. When farmers take fish larger than that to a processing plant, they are paid a much-reduced price for their fish since extra labor is required to process them by hand and there are limited markets for larger fish.
However, many of these large fish aren’t even making it to the processing plant because they are so good at escaping harvest. As they continue to grow beyond market size, they are eating a large amount of feed and actually eating other fish. Lawson says all three of these issues are hurting farmers financially.
“You’re putting food in there, but the big fish are eating it, and the little fish aren’t getting it. So, you’re reducing the growth of the smaller fish you’re trying to grow and you’re basically wasting feed on big fish you don’t want to grow,” he said. “And you’re going to get docked on those big fish when you send them to the processing plant.”
Some of the farms, it seems, are beginning to allow anglers in to help remove some of the excessively large catfish, which one would think the ideal solution; fishermen will carp–e diem and pay to pull in big, tasty catfish, producing an income stream as opposed to having to spend money solving the problem some other way. It’s a fin idea. The catch would be making sure no would-be anglers sneak in without paying; this is one case where the old aphorism about keeping one’s friends close and anemones closer, just doesn’t apply.
Certainly, we’re not herring of this issue for the last time, but between farmers, fishermen, and biologists, they’ll certainly find a solution, and the Alabama fish farmers will continue providing tasty catfish to American tables for some time to come.
