Aquaculture Now

Fish farms. It always amazes me what the great unwashed masses don't know. For example, if you were to go to the Midwest and ask John Q public where he might find a hot bed of aquaculture, top of mind probably would not be Idaho. Guess what cowboy, or should that be fishmonger, go down to Twin Falls and the surrounding area and you will find an amazing amount of talapia, trout, even sturgeon and oysters being grown in an agricultural area known as aquaculture. It is a huge industry but, as we find from Value-Added Ag Program Coordinator Dan Burden, marketing is a key component to industry growth. "Different small producers were interested in raising fish that got into it, did no market research before hand with respect to getting their products out into the world and then they raised fish and then they went, hey, what are we going to do with our fish and they had no idea. So you had operations that started and died pretty quickly. Culturally there was not any of the interest in the product that there is today, the whole buy local movement had not really happened. There is a system that we have been going off of where we can start planning what that production will look like and getting multiple farmers together in a cooperative style and environment where they can get all of their fish to market on a schedule so that processors have product continuously coming through so that we can really feed the demand from, let's say, a large grocery store chain.