In Decatur, Ill., Forrest “Butch” Sawlaw monitors a fish breeding operation that uses the excess heat, electricity and hot water from a giant grain-processing plant to turn thousands of tiny fish eggs into fingerlings.
Through the wide range of Illinois weather, those tilapia are coddled in constant 85-degree water, then shipped to Peoria, where they grow to 1 1/4 pounds before being trucked, still alive, to Chicago, New York and Toronto. There they become dinner in restaurants and homes, having never lived outside a controlled environment.
“They are very prolific,” says Sawlaw, plant manager of Archer Daniels Midland Corp.’s hydroponic division. “They out-produce catfish, bass, trout and other farmed fish. And they thrive in a closed system.”
As the world’s oceans, lakes and streams become more depleted of seafood and as concerns about contamination and food safety grow, aquaculture-the farming of fish (and plants) in water-becomes a more viable alternative. When people buy seafood in stores and restaurants, chances are increasing that it has been cultivated rather than caught wild. More than 15 percent of the U.S. seafood supply comes from aquaculture, according to statistics compiled by the Department of Agriculture.
Virtually all commercial catfish, trout, tilapia and Atlantic salmon now come from farms in the U.S. and abroad, says Dave Harvey, a USDA agricultural economist who specializes in aquaculture.
Catfish, trout, crayfish and salmon represent about 80 percent of all domestic aquaculture production from the more than 3,400 fish farms in the country. And in the last 10 years, aquaculture has grown by more than 60 percent, mostly because of the expanding catfish industry, he says.
Now that catfish demand is leveling off, other species are starting to find niches. Some species, including tilapia, a white-fleshed fish native to the Nile and North Africa, now are bred here because they are adaptable to farming.
Illinois, though it is not a leader, is starting to become a minor player in the aquaculture industry.
Half a dozen large corporations and more than twice that number of smaller operations are producing tilapia, channel catfish, striped bass, trout and perch for food. Meanwhile, in about 20 high schools around the state, students are raising food fish as a part of their coursework.
“About 100 people are involved, including individuals and companies, ranging from single-person operations to large corporations,” says Delayne Holsapple, coordinator for the Illinois Aquaculture Task Force, a part of the Illinois Department of Agriculture. “Some do it as a hobby and a few are doing it for a living.”
Here’s a look at how fish are cultivated in Illinois by two corporate operations and one high school:
Full-circle industry
In the shadows of smokestacks and distillation towers at the Archer Daniels Midland central factory in Decatur lies a small cluster of greenhouses. They seem inconsistent with this huge international processor of grain products such as animal feed, alcohols, sweeteners and flours. But Butch Sawlaw says they fit right into the corporation’s plans.
About 13 years ago, plant planners were looking for something to do with the excess steam and electrical power generated by the factory, which burns soft Illinois coal in self-cleaning furnaces and is energy self-sufficient.
Hydroponics, or water gardening, seemed the answer. Now hot water drawn from the factory’s production of sweetener is piped to heat the hydrofarm: Water comes in at 160 degrees and returns to the corn sweetener plant cooled to 120 degrees, perfect for the next stage of fructose processing.
Year-round, hybrid Boston lettuce seeds are dropped into grids of spongy pasteboard-40,000 at a crack-where they germinate and after 40 days grow into lettuce heads, all without soil. “Workers can harvest, wrap and pack about 20,000 heads a day,” Sawlaw says.
There is no grit, no cleaning and only an occasional bug, he says-none of the detriments that threaten plants raised in dirt fields.
In another greenhouse, English cucumbers hang like thick green cigars from trellises and are picked at the rate of 3,000 a week. Both vegetables are shipped and sold under the Rain Garden brand to Jewel Food Stores and other supermarkets throughout the state.
Both crops get a boost from CO2, a byproduct of the company’s fermentation of ethanol used for gasohol.
About two years ago the company began experimenting with tilapia fish and found that the fish’s waste made the water high in nitrogen and phosphate compounds. It wasn’t good for the fish, but it was perfect for the plants, “basically free fertilizer,” Sawlaw says. Water from the fish operations is now recycled to the hydroponic gardens. In addition, the tilapia, which are tropical fish, also need warm water, which Archer Daniels has in abundance.
Archer Daniels breeds the tilapia at its Decatur works, then trucks them to a former whiskey warehouse in Peoria, about 2 1/2 hours away, where they are matured in 17 tanks, each holding about 35,000 gallons of water and about 10,000 fish. The Peoria aquaculture operation uses leftover heat and electricity from the Archer Daniels plant there.
The 170,000 tilapia in the Peoria tanks are fed grain-based meal (made from Archer Daniels products) by automatic feeders. Water comes from separate wells. A computer monitors the temperature, water flow and oxygen. Huge rotating filters screen out waste and nitrates.
Apart from adding the fingerlings and harvesting the fish when they reach about 1 1/4 pounds, work for the seven aquaculture employees at the Peoria plant consists mainly of monitoring and maintenance. Mature fish are shipped live in 300- and 600-gallon tanks, and end up mostly in Asian restaurants and markets, where they are familiar.
“We sell about 10,000 pounds a week for about $1.60 a pound (wholesale),” says James Blankman, manager of the Peoria aquaculture division. “The market seems to be bottomless,” he says. “There always is demand.”
Yet even with free heat and electricity, the vegetable and fish operations barely break even, Sawlaw says. “Without those advantages, we couldn’t.”
But there is plenty of room for ADM’s aquaculture program to expand. The Peoria tanks now occupy only one floor of the six-story red brick building. “Conceivably we could put tanks on five more floors,” says Sawlaw. “That would produce more than 50,000 pounds a week. When there is the market for it, that’s probably what we will do.”
Making lakes
Over in Williamson County, a coal company that scooped wide holes in the earth here to reclaim excess carbon from southern Illinois coal mines now has flooded those pits to raise fish for food.
On one 17-acre lake near Johnston City, four 640-cubic-foot plywood boxes or raceways float just under the surface, each holding 5,000 blue catfish or yellow perch while the weather is warm. Come fall, the boxes will house equal numbers of rainbow trout and arctic char. A short distance away, Mid-Continental Fisheries, a subdivision of Mid-Continental Fuels Corp., is constructing a larger fish farm on a lake made from a 30-acre strip pit.
“It’s the next technology,” says Dan Selock, “taking a non-productive hole and making it productive.” Selock is vice president of marketing for Mid-Continental Fisheries and a former county extension agent at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. “It can be done in many spots in Illinois: surface mines, barrow rock pits, gravel pits.”
Four tanks and attached walkways float like a 40-by-40-foot barge about 20 feet out from the edge of the pit. With the fish so confined and accessible, sorting, feeding and spawning are easy to control.
“We stretch chicken wire across the top to keep out hungry birds, especially cormorants, herons and egrets, all of which are federally protected and all of which can eat a pound or more of fish per day,” Selock says. “Otherwise, you just have to watch them feed on your profits.”
Pumps move 500 gallons per minute through the boxes, giving each a complete water change every 8 minutes. Solid waste-high in nitrates and phosphorous-is filtered out and sold to plant growers as fish emulsion fertilizer.
“The system accomplishes a couple things,” Selock says. “It is environmentally friendly because it does not pollute the lake, so we can raise more fish. The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency likes to see waste dealt with, and selling the fertilizer raises money.”
The raceways in the 17-acre lake have been working for almost a year. They were used for growing rainbow trout during the winter and have held blue catfish during the warmer months. “In July we stocked one box with yellow perch,” says Selock, “and we have channel catfish in another.”
In the 30-acre lake there will be 14 raceways, what Selock calls “a real commercial-size operation.” It’s about half done. Each raceway holds 5,000 fish, about double what would be in 1 acre of water under natural conditions.
This intensive farming “is money-saving but you also take a risk,” Selock says, “because there are so many fish in a small space. Disease and infection can occur, so you have to pay close attention. We had one parasite hit. And a bacterial disease epidemic with the yellow perch.”
When that happens operators can shut down a pump temporarily, put medication into the water and give the fish a medicated bath for a half-hour before flushing it out again, Selock says. “It’s much easier to treat a tank than a 17-acre lake.”
The USDA allows fewer than half a dozen drugs to be used in aquaculture, all biodegradable, Selock says. Each medication has a specified withdrawal time ranging from 5 to 25 days during which the fish cannot be harvested or mixed with other non-treated fish. “We test them frequently,” says.
“We plan to process the fish, selling it as whole fish and as dressed fillets. Maybe we’ll smoke some.”
Selock envisions a kind of cooperative for fish farmers in lower Illinois, with a central plant processing and selling fish from several farmers, none of whom would have capital, time or the space to do those things for themselves.
“I would like to see us sell the equipment, fingerlings and feed, then buy the fish back, process it and market it,” he says. “People don’t want to have to worry about taking their fish around to the supermarkets and Kiwanis clubs to sell it.”
Besides being a good food for humans, fish are efficient, Selock says. About 1.6 pounds of feed is needed to raise 1 pound of edible fish. That compares to 8 pounds for a cow and 4 pounds for a hog. Chickens require about 2 pounds.
Because the operation is outside, catfish can’t be raised in winter, but Mid-Continental can raise trout and arctic char, a salmonlike fish that grows well in farms.
In Illinois, about 95 percent of fish consumed comes from out of state or even out of the country, Selock says. The Chicago area is the third-largest consumer of fish in the country, and he says Illinois farmers ought to get a piece of that action. Mid-Continental Fisheries is 3 miles from Interstate Highway 57 and can ship to Chicago in 5 to 6 hours.
“Aquaculture fills the void between wild fish and the increasing demand for food fish. I would like Illinois to participate in that market.”
Learning to fish
Russell Layman’s contribution to the future of aquaculture in Illinois is difficult to measure. It probably will go beyond the 150 tilapia swimming in a 250-gallon plastic tank in a corner of the high school garage in the tiny town of Roanoke, 25 miles east of Peoria.
Layman is the agriculture teacher at Roanoke-Benson High School, and the tilapia tank-with its pumps, water heaters, filters and water-testing devices-is what he uses to teach fish farming. It’s an animal husbandry program that doesn’t involve keeping chickens, hogs or cattle on school property. “The village board certainly would object to that,” Russell chuckles.
In this rural community, farming and farm-related business are the principal occupations, but growing fish, especially fish native to the Nile, is not something most kids learn while doing their daily chores.
“Frankly, it’s a lot the same as raising other kinds of animals,” says Layman, who grew up on a nearby farm before going off to the University of Illinois. “You employ the same concepts. You worry about proper nutrition, controlling the environment. . . . It’s just that you’re sort of doing it in a swimming pool . . . and the students don’t get as attached to the fish, so at the end of the year when we fry them up and feed them to the parents, it’s not like losing a pet.”
Layman, who got interested in aquaculture a few years ago at a state-sponsored workshop for teachers, landed a $2,000 state start-up grant to purchase the tank and other equipment.
The fry (tilapia minnows) come from a program run by the University of Illinois, Layman says, and eat feed made from soy protein and fish meal. The course, which involves 12 students at a time in three-week sessions, covers record-keeping as well as the feeding, cleaning and monitoring of the tanks.
The tilapia consume less than twice their weight in food, making them very efficient. “We’d even like to get that down,” Layman says.
The high school’s aquaculture system is simple: The water is kept at 80 degrees by four heaters. Water is siphoned out and pumped over a set of filters in which bacteria neutralize the nitrates from the waste-a passive, self-perpetuating operation. The filtering helps to aerate the water before it returns to the tank.
“Basically it’s a large aquarium,” says Layman.
Just before they are harvested about a year from birth-when they reach 1 to 1 1/2 pounds-the fish are taken off the feed and kept in fresh water for three days.
“Last year we had a big fish fry. After school the kids came in and weighed, filleted and fried them up. They invited members of the FFA (Future Farmers of America), other ag students and parents,” he says.
“Mostly the response has been positive, with a bit of curiosity from adults.”
Agriculture and aquaculture require the same basic decisions and attention, Layman says. “Nutrition is nutrition . . . Vitamins, minerals, maintenance, record-keeping, watching the percent of protein in the diet, even the environmental controls are not that much different. And you still have chores to do.”
Can you make a profit? Layman is asked.
“Last year the feed for about 100 one-pound fish cost us $60. Figure the labor, hypothetical equipment payments, maintenance, depreciation, then the probable market price,” Layman says. “Did we make a paper profit? Maybe not. Did we make an educational profit? I’d say so.”
HOW FISH ARE FARMED
1. At the Archer Daniels Midland grain-processing plant in Decatur, Ill., the aquaculture division breeds tilapia fish in several large tanks.
2. After the eggs are laid and fertilized, several hundred females carry them in their mouths for about two weeks. Each female is “milked” and can yield up to 400 eggs.
3. The eggs are placed in a special bath until they hatch into newborn fry. The fry are are housed and fed until they reach finger size, which takes 7 or 8 weeks.
4. Several of these fingerlings are kept in large glass tanks at the Decatur plant (left) to be used for later breeding.
5. The rest of the fingerlings are packed in insulated tanks and shipped by truck to the ADM plant in Peoria. There the fingerlings grow to maturity in huge concrete pools, each of which holds 10,000 fish.
6. The water that has circulated through the fish tanks in Decatur becomes enriched with the fish waste’s nitrate compounds, which are valuable nutrients for green plants. The waste water is mixed with fresh water and circulated through about 10 acres of hydroponic gardens, where it feeds Boston lettuce (above), English cucumber plants and a few roses.
7. The lettuce, picked at a rate of 20,000 heads a week, and the burpless cucumbers are packed by workers at the Decatur ADM plant. The green produce is shipped to and sold through Jewel Food Stores and other supermarkets throughout the state.
8. Fish in the Peoria facility are kept in tanks until they reach 1 1/4 pounds. Then they are harvested and shipped live in 300-gallon crates to New York, Chicago and Toronto to be sold through a wholesaler to retail outlets, mostly in Asian communities.
9. In hundreds of restaurants and homes, fresh tilapia are cleaned, filleted and prepared in various dishes.
