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California fish farms going high-tech to increase productivity
MECCA , Calif. Fish swimming in the desert?
It sounds strange, but it makes sense to Jim Carlberg. He's the president of Kent Seatech, a fish farm near Palm Springs that yields about ten-thousand pounds of striped bass each day.
The company has built an artificial wetland to revitalize water for tanks stocked with the hybrid breeds of fish that look and taste like salt water bass, but can live in fresh water.
Researchers are also sampling the D-N-A of the best fish for future selective breeding and developing fish vaccines to avoid using antibiotics.
California Aquaculture Association president Dennis Faria says Kent Seatech is on the cutting edge of the fish farming industry.
But it's not alone in its high tech approach to raising fish.
California 's aquaculture industry is dominated by small fish farmers who sell to so-called "live markets." But farmers are developing ways to produce higher-value fish.
Sacramento-based Sterling Caviar is one of the only companies in the world to produce the delicacy on a farm.
The process began two decades ago with a crop of sturgeon fingerlings and research on spawning done by Soviet scientists trying to restock the Caspian Sea.
Once they raised enough female sturgeon to produce a salable amount of caviar, they had to develop a way to make them release eggs in the absence of environmental cues they encounter in the wild.
The solution was to move fish that could produce caviar into cold water and treat other fish with hormones to produce the next generation of fingerlings.
Back at Kent Seatech, Jim Carlberg looks over the farm's system of canals, wetlands and production tanks. He says he and his staff are proud when they think that it all "started with some small aquariums and waste studies."
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