Fish Farms on the Creosote Flats

FISH FARMS ON THE CREOSOTE FLATS DESERT PARADOX

TEXT BY TOM DOLLAR PHOTOGRAPHS BY JACK W. DYKINGA Four years ago, when Art and Barbara Siebert moved to a 10-acre plot of ground in the Hyder Valley west of Gila Bend, Arizona, to raise fish, they didn't know what they were in for. Barbara had been a department store buyer; Art had supervised an auto parts warehouse crew. As fish farmers they were absolute novices. Desert life wasn't new to them, but they had never lived in a place where summer temperatures routinely soar to 110° F. They lived in a house trailer with no telephone, beyond television range, and with poor radio reception. The nearest town, Gila Bend (population 1,611), was an hour's drive away.

routinely soar to 110° F. They lived in a house trailer with no telephone, beyond television range, and with poor radio reception. The nearest town, Gila Bend (population 1,611), was an hour's drive away.

Water was abundant in the aquifer beneath the parched desert surrounding their humble trailer, but it was brackish, so they had to haul in fresh water for drinking. Swirling dust devils moved across the miles of creosote flats, relieved here and there by the faint green of a desert wash tracing its way across the parched landscape toward distant mountains.

Every day at dusk, they retreated to the relative cool of their trailer to while away the hours leafing through magazines or watching video movies. Sometimes, as an alternate diversion, they would take their .22-caliber rifle to the porch to plink beer cans as the sun dipped behind a distant peak. But as the long, hot days of summer settled upon them in relentless procession, the magazines got pretty dog-eared, and when they noticed they had memorized the lines of all the characters in the video dramas, their sense of isolation deepened.

As inhospitable as the environment may have been for humans, however, two fac-tors made it ideal for fish farming. The first was an abundant supply of near-surface geothermal water, 80° F. or warmer, that sometimes in summer had to be cooled before it could be used as a habitat for fish. The second was availability of an extraordinary genus of fish, the tilapia, imported from Africa and the Middle East, that had been domesticated for centuries and adapted immediately to these desert surroundings.

Believed by some scholars to be the fish in the biblical miracle of the loaves and fishes, the tilapia is sometimes called St. Peter's fish and may appear on restaurant menus as Nile River perch. Notable for its precocious breeding habits, rapid growth, ability to live in either fresh or salt water, tolerance of crowding, and resistance to disease, the tilapia has been known to sur-vive without aeration in water tempera-tures exceeding 100° F.

Thus, on a shoestring budget and with the help of the farm's principal owner and skilled entrepreneur, Brian McNelis, the Sieberts set to work to establish Gila River Fishery. Together they studied books on tropical aquaculture and, by trial and error, learned which species of tilapia would do best in Hyder Valley conditions. They drilled a well and installed a high-powered pump; they scraped out breeding ponds with a backhoe. They put up a covered nursery shed where fish fry would grow to fingerling size before being transferred to raceways concrete-lined ditches to be grown out. Art, “a guy who can fix some-thing with nothing,” says McNelis, did the carpentry, plumbing, and electrical wiring.

Meanwhile, McNelis scouted potential markets for fish among Tucson's white-tablecloth restaurants and specialty grocery stores. When not thus occupied, he scoured salvage yards and back lots for discarded polyvinyl pipe, corrugated metal sheeting, lumber, reinforcing steel, fuse boxes-anything that could be recycled.

Eventually Gila River Fishery became an enclave of three house trailers and a cou-ple of sheds. One of the trailers, outfitted with recycled tubs, hoses, sinks, and coun-tertops, became a small processing plant where fish were dressed for mar-ket-about 200 pounds of fillets and whole fish each week, not much com-pared to larger growers in the Hyder Valley but almost enough to pay the bills.

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There is nothing new about fish farm-ing the Chinese have been domesticating fish for perhaps 4,000 years, since shortly after they learned to domesticate live-stock-but aquaculture is becoming an increasingly important food source world-wide as overfishing depletes ocean fish-eries. Every year since 1982, the yield from ocean fisheries has diminished, despite far-ranging fishing vessels, sophisticated fish finders, and high-tech processing facilities aboard ship. Already, in some parts of the world, only a fraction of all seafood con-sumed comes from the seas.

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Aquaculture includes the production of finfish, shellfish, and seaweed. Asian countries are the top producers, accounting for more than half of the world's total. China leads in shellfish and seaweed production and is second to India in the finfish cate-gory, with carp the main fish raised in both countries. Other nations among world aquaculture leaders are Japan, Israel, the Soviet Union, the Philippines, Indonesia, and South Korea.

The United States, now coming on strong, is in the top 10 in finfish and shellfish production including crustaceans. Already, nearly all rainbow trout, catfish, and crayfish and almost half of the oysters and mussels brought to market in the Unit-ed States are grown on fish farms. Aquaculture in this country is among the most diversified in the world, and with continuing improvement in applicable technology, the United States should become a world leader in the early 1990s.

A market study prepared for the Arizona Game and Fish Department suggests that Arizona's Hyder Valley may become a major center for tropical aquaculture. Already 70 percent of the supply of food fish grown in Arizona is produced in the valley. As fish consumption continues to rise nationwide, the resources of Hyder Valley growers will be tested by the demand for product diversification and the need to harvest a continuous crop. The solution presumably lies in big farms with hundreds of acres of water and on-site processing plants.

Currently there are six farms in the valley, ranging in size from the bootstrap Gila River Fishery to giant Western Aqua Farms, Inc. With 26 raceways and ponds, the 40 acres of water at Western create a riparian oasis and aquatic paradise for migratory birds. Herons, egrets, stilts, killdeers, ospreys, kingfishers, plovers, ducks, and geese have become regular visitors.

Richard Yanzito, president of Western Aqua Farms, predicts dramatic growth over the next five years. Western is negotiating the purchase of a 1,200-acre farm nearby on which to expand its aquaculture operation, including a processing plant.

Intensive production is expected to yield annually more than a million pounds of whole fish per acre of water.

So convinced of the potential for aqua-culture in the Hyder Valley is the University of Arizona's Environmental Research Laboratory a decade-long leader in aqua-culture research, salt-tolerant plant development, and the recycling of fish-culture water that ERL has signed a technical assistance agreement with private investors to build a multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art fish farm near Dateland, Arizona. Planning to sell fish nationwide and

abroad, ALFICO, as the farm will be known, is expected eventually to produce enough whole tilapia per year to make it one of the largest such farms in the state.

Plans call for developing a large processing plant on-site to receive all the fish grown on the farm and most of those produced elsewhere in the Hyder Valley. Kevin Fitzsimmons, head of ERL's tilapia résearch program, will manage the fish farm, employing 5 to 10 workers; another 20 to 30 will work at the processing plant.

Compared to conventional agriculture, fish farming is good water management, a critical consideration in the desert. In the first place, it takes less water to grow a pound of fish than to grow a pound of cotton; and in summer, when the water is kept warm by air temperatures, it's possible to shut down the pumps and use only recirculated water except for limited amounts required to offset evaporation.

Another economy of fish culture is that water can be recirculated through 10 or more populations of fish before the effluent is used to irrigate a conventional agricultural crop like snow peas, alfalfa, or asparagus. “It makes a lot of sense,” says Jerry Walters, farm manager at Inland Fisheries, “to improve water by running it through a fish before putting it out on a dirt crop. The water becomes nutrient-rich from all the fish wastes.” But it's the possibility of yet another crop within a closed, self-sustaining agricultural system that fires the imaginations of Walters and a lot of other Hyder Valley fish farmers. Tail water from the fish project could be used to irrigate a grain crop-corn, for example-which would then be harvested to manufacture ethanol. Next, the cleared field would be flooded from one of the settling ponds and crayfish put in to forage on the corn stubble. When the crayfish reach maturity, the field would be drained, the crayfish harvested, and the field prepared for another corn crop-fertilized, perhaps, with mineral-saturated solids dredged from one of the drained settling ponds.

Once the corn starch has been used to make grain alcohol, the protein-packed byproduct could become fish feed. Thus another cycle begins. In a world of diminishing resources, the self-sustaining cyclical approach becomes especially attractive.

Even now, raising fish is a much more efficient use of natural resources than growing other kinds of animal protein. To produce a pound of beef, for example, requires 7 pounds of grain; a pound of pork, 3.25 pounds; a pound of chicken, almost 2.5 pounds. Tilapia, on the other hand, will yield a pound of meat for a little more than a pound of grain; and in a selfsustaining system in which the fish will help (in a manner of speaking) to produce their own food, the conversion ratio is further reduced. As Hyder Valley's reputation as a prime

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location for fish culture grows, things are happening fast in its aquaculture industry. New investors come in looking to profit from a boom that seems certain to occur; farms change hands, new technologies are introduced. Western Aqua Farms came into being when its parent company, Western Agri Group, acquired the assets of Global Fisheries. The subsidiary company was formed to operate those assets.

Gila River Fishery, the godchild of McNelis and the Sieberts, was bought by Mike Frimer, a Chicago native who learned about fish culture during the five years he managed the fisheries program on a kibbutz near the Jordan border in Israel. He plans to introduce Israeli technologies that are themselves based on European pondculture models.

A significant development during the last year was a bill passed in the Arizona Legislature creating a state Department of Agriculture. The new regulatory agency, with jurisdiction over all forms of agriculture including aquaculture, is expected to encourage the development of fish farming throughout the state. As a result, fish growers anticipate an easier time getting applications for new farms accepted and more rapid approval for the introduction of new species of fish.

It's easy to see why growers, fish brokers, and consumers are enthusiastic about tilapia as a food fish. It's firm-textured and when fresh has no “fishy” odor or taste. Unlike the fabled schmoo of Al Capp's Li'l Abner, the tilapia does not perform feats of self-sacrifice and metamorphosis to appear magically on your plate as Virginia ham, linked sausage, or lobster thermidor; but it certainly “doesn't fight the chef,” says ERL'S Kevin Fitzsimmons. Tilapia can be poached, baked, broiled, fried, blackened, stuffed, wrapped in banana leaves; it can be cooked whole or as fillets. It goes well with a number of sauces, herbs, spices, and condiments, accepting and complementing their flavors. Various strains of the fish have different colorations, and can thus be marketed under different brand names. It won't be long, Hyder Valley growers tell us, before your family's preferred fish may arrive at your market brightly packaged as Hyder Valley Red Tilapia, Desert Rose, Tapifish, or Desert Brand. Whatever the trademark, it will be Arizona homedesert-grown Hyder Valley tilapia.