ACROSS THE DITCH
Why not TROUT?
BY JOHN MOSIG G
'day Kiwi. How's it going on your side of The Ditch? Or should I say pond. I'm in the US of A on a bit of R&R. Down in New Mexico. It's a lot like Kiwi over
here. Huge snow capped mountains, beautiful mountain streams full of trout. Which brings me to this issue's theme. You see, they don't
have a trout farming industry here either. Lots of local hatcheries restocking streams for recreational anglers, but no aquaculture. They have a similar problem: they can't see how aquaculture and angling can live side by side. Now I don't want to labour this, but with a grossly
overcrowded planet taking a mere 11 years to tot up the last billion souls, the next billion won't take more than a decade. So how are we going to feed them all? Surely not by dangling a line in a likely pond or stalking a trophy fi sh with an enticing fl y. That's right, the time has come to face reality; fi shing and
farming can live side by side. The environmental issue is a no-brainer. Any by-product of metabolism can be readily neutralised. They do it in Denmark. Just about every stream
Trout do well in captivity
that can economically support a trout farm has one, without compromising the quality of the down stream water quality. Organics in suspension are settled out and hey, are eagerly sought as fertilizer. Organics in solution are either stripped hydroponically or by using biological fi lter medium. So what about the real issue: the political one. And it's one that goes back a few thousand years by my reckoning: the hunter gatherer vs the farmer. I know there's deep concern that if trout farming were allowed it would open the door to poaching. And there's poaching now, is there? OK, make that wholesale poaching. Let's look at the regulatory side of it fi rst. Surely a paper
trail, supported by tagged fi sh, can be set in place to make it possible to identify farmed fi sh. The penalties could be set to make illicit traffi cking unprofi table. But there's another deterrent, and that's the commercial
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one. Poachers, oops, hunter gathers, can only sell what they can catch, and they're never quite sure what that's going to be. A farmer can sell what he can produces and he knows what that's going to be once he has the fertilized eggs on the tray – give or take the usual farming risks. If you were running a retail business who would you want to be doing business with? I thought so, the reliable supplier of quality seafood.
Which highlights the last differential: quality. Sure, that
brown or rainbow you've patiently stalked, lured and fi nally landed, tastes like manna from heaven on the riverbank as the sun sinks below the ridge and the bottle of Napier white you've been chilling sparkles in the last rays of the day. But the reality is that fi sh that have been fed an optimum diet in good water quality will always be in prime condition, and that's what the controller of the domestic budget demands. I don't want to go on about it, after all, it's not really
any of my business, but it just seems to be such a wasted opportunity. Especially when food security is going to be a major issue over the ensuring decades. Anyway, think about it.
12 ■ NZ AQUACULTURE ■ JULY/AUGUST 2012
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