Trout: From Elite Sport Fish to Global Aquaculture
Trout amandine. Duck in orange sauce. When I was coming of age in 1960s England, these were the prestige restaurant dishes. I’m not sure how I knew that. Such restaurants were far out of reach of my pocket.
Trout also swam in the river that ran along the southern boundary of our farm. Although we owned the rights to fish for the trout, that did not put the fish on the table. Such a valuable resource could be turned into cash. We leased those rights to a Fishing Club.
The Fishing Club supported a “water keeper,” Mr. Wilkins. In the stream that ran through his garden in the village, he hatched trout to restock the river. He kept the water weed in the river trimmed for good flow, leaving enough for the trout to hide. He installed benches on the banks for the “fishing gents” to sit when they cast their lines.
Flouting the English legal system that limited fishing to the rich, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, hungry poachers took trout by tickling. They looked for a trout resting in a sunny spot, lowly slid one hand under the fish, lulling it by tickling its belly, and then flipped it out of the water.
Tickling trout intrigued me as a child. I spent hours on my belly with my hand in the stream. Perhaps I wasn’t patient enough. The trout always darted away.
When I moved to America, then, I was amazed to discover that fishing was a popular hobby, open to anyone.
Yet even with the abundance of fast-running trout streams in many parts of the United States, trout will never become a common food with hobby fishing. For that, intensive aquaculture is needed.
Trout Farming in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina
Thus an invitation to tour trout farms in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina was irresistible. A dramatic landscape; a meal prepared by Cherokee members of the North American Indian Women’s Association; experts on freshwater aquaculture technology. Not to be missed.
Trout farms turned out to be quite small, just a few acres at most. Although located in beautiful spots, like most large scale agriculture, the actual farms were rather prosaic, consisting of a series of long, rectangular concrete pools (raceways), each for a different cohort of trout.
A trout farm needs an ample flow of cool, oxygenated, clean freshwater running through the raceways. Without this, the trout die.
(As an aside, if you are one of those concerned about the salubrity of fish farming, farmed trout are therefore what you might call self-certifying).
What’s an ample suppy? of water A lot. Wes Eason pointed to this aerial photo of the forest and reservoir above his third-generation family farm, Sunburst. 6,000 gallons a minute of that water go through his raceways. The average American family uses about 300 gallons a day.
Thus trout farms cluster in the mountains, in Appalachia, Idaho and such places. There are other demands on this water for industry and, increasingly for recreation and for maintaining a good environment. Imagine the problems of balancing those demands and of maintaining clean, aerated water for the year and a half that it takes to grow (say) a million trout to a marketable size of 1 ½ lbs.
Harold Brown of Carolina Mountain Farms, the largest trout operation east of the Mississippi, described a lifetime of coming up with one inventive solution after another for increasing the oxygen in the water, purifying the outflow. He’s now working on restoring and maintaining the stream that runs through one of the farms, in cooperation with Joey Owle, Secretary of Agriculture and Farming for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the owners of the land.
As an example, with so many trout in a raceway, disease spreads quickly. Populations downstream don’t want large large quantities of medications or antibiotics dumped in the water. So Carolina Mountains vaccinates the the trout as babies, or fingerlings as they are called, being about the size of your first finger. One million fingerlings a year.
How do they manage that huge number? They net the fingerlings and tip them on to corrugated plastic trays to line them up. In four and a half hours, the expert vaccinator jabs 10,000 fingerlings.
Democratizing trout, therefore, means going from individuals casting a line in a stream to big business.
To make a living wage out of trout farming, explained Harold Brown, you have to raise 250,000 lbs. of trout a year. That’s 125 tons. You have to rent or buy land with access to huge amounts of clean, cool water (good luck), deal with an alphabet soup of different state and federal agencies, and invest about ½ million in construction, and support yourself during the 5-year start up period.
And there’s an urgency about getting fish farming scaled up. Several times Harold Brown mentioned the the ocean-going Chinese fishing vessels that are taking marine fish at a frightening rate. Numbers of vessels are hard to come by, but 2000 are often mentioned. The US has less than a dozen, I understand. America imports, Harold Brown believes, about 90% of the fish consumed.
Trout Farming Around the Globe
On returning home to Lexington, Kentucky, the May 31st copy of the Economist had turned up in my absence. What did I find? A long article on innovation in Norwegian aquaculture. If humans are to continue to consume fish, concluded the author, freshwater aquaculture would be the way to go.
Sunburst had mentioned that Fresh Market was a large customer. I went there hoping to buy their fresh trout. No luck.
I did find a packet of Ducktrap Smoked Trout. It had been smoked in Maine, but if I interpreted the small print correctly, raised in Colombia, South America.
Ducktrap, Google informed me, is now owned by Mowi, a Norwegian aquaculture company with a global reach. Salmon is their specialty, but trout benefits from their knowledge. Mowi employs 11,500 people, with farms in China, Turkey, the Faroe Islands and a dozen other countries.
Abundant farm-raised trout. It’s a very long way from trout amandine for the well-to-do in fancy restaurants.
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Trout were the Friday table fare in my family for years. My father, an ardent fisherman, supplied them. It’s always amazed me that they’re considered any sort of delicacy as a result. I fish for them myself, on the same streams and rivers my father did all those many years ago.
You’ve touched on a minor hobby of mine: tracking the way different dishes move up and down the social scale. It’s often connected with abundance. Lucky you having a fisherman father who supplied trout regularly, though it sounds as if you did not particularly relish it.
I didn’t mind it. Mostly it left me quite surprised that trout are regarded as a delicacy. Indeed, I heard on a podcast that in the state to the north of us they’re regarded as so pedestrian people avoid eating them, although I suspect that has more to do with the onset of sport fishing here, which really wasn’t something when I was a kid. Many people fished, but fish were food.
They still are on our table. I fish, and my children fish. We eat fish fairly regularly.
We’ll see where it goes. Oysters were once (not very safe) food for the poor.
I loved fishing for rainbow trout with my father as a child, they are a pretty fish. We enjoyed them simply gutted and grilled whole over a charcoal fire.
Smoked trout is delicious. However, it does lack the fat content of other fish that lend themselves well to smoking (lake whitefish, herring, mackerel, salmon, sturgeon, black cod).
As far as a relatively well distributed commercial product (in the States), Ducktrap is pretty good. I like that they keep the skin on the filet. My favorite is to peel that off and crisp it up in a toaster oven. Crisped fish skin is an underrated snack.
Ah, someone else who knows much more about trout than I do. Grilled whole sounds delicious but I fear these farms filet most of their product. And we are of one mind about crisped fish skin, except I did mine in a frying pan. I’ll try the toaster oven next time. Many people in Hawaii fried smaller (but obviously not the very fine) fish bones as a snack. They are good too. Thanks for the comment. It all fills out the picture.
I completely agree with you on fish bones. Fried anchovy and eel bones are delicious. My mother’s favorite dish when we would go to one of our local Chinese restaurants was a flat fish, such as a sole or flounder, served in its entire skeleton that had been fried and curved to hold the flesh.
That sounds wonderful.
I’ll typically grill mine, sometimes on a charcoal hibachi. My mother usually fried them, which made for excellent crispy skins. She usually rolled them in cornmeal first.
Either way sounds way tastier than a filet.
Excessive fishing can be a threat to fish population. Fish farming is the right way to go. That was a good job Mr. Wilkins was doing then – restocking the river.
I’m seriously considering trout farming, but the biggest challenge here in Nigeria, with epileptic power outages, is trying to rear a species of freshwater fish that requires non-stop aeration.
Yes, and unlike the ones I visited where a lot of the aeration came from the change in altitude of the river, if you are near Lagos as I think you are, then there’s no altitude change to speak of. So you’d be very dependent on a reliable supply of electricity.
You’re correct, Rachel, there no change is altitude in Lagos. For aerating our ponds, we solely depend on solar power, as one cannot rely on the national grid.