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Aquaculture Tanks Making a Difference Part 3
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Watertown Daily Times
July 29, 2001
Entrepreneur Aims To ‘Speed Grow’ Fish To Help Mohawks Return To Traditional Diet
By Eliza Bettinger Part 3
Mr. Benedict clearly enjoys the chance to collaborate with so many people, though he acknowledges their priorities are different.
“For us, this isn’t about ‘academic curiosity,’” he said. “We don’ have
time to waste. We have people who need this food now.”
That commitment extends to economic development in Akweasane. Elkohowk recently hosted a community college course that taught seven Akwesasne young adults the aquaculture technology.
At the head of that class was Scott Peters, who is now Mr. Benedict’s ever-present head technician.
Once the first crop of perch is ready, Ekohawk will sell them live to anyone who stops by the farm, he said.
Eventually, he dreams of producing not just perch, but a variety of species once safe to eat from the St. Lawrence. Among such species, perch present the fewest hurdles—trout grow slowly, and walleye tend to cannibalize each other in crowded conditions.
And what he’s learned about pond-raising fish won’t go to waste—he plans to use the outdoor tanks to raise and store his own breeding stock, eventually avoiding the expensive annual trips to Midwest hatcheries to pick up millions of eggs.
His wife, Donna,, who also works at the business attests to the single mindedness required to make a vision come to life. Mrs. Benedicts say’s she pushed him to pursue fish farming after the idea first occurred to him.
“You just have to put the blinders on and focus on it. You can’t be distracted,” Mrs. Benedict said.
The energetic man with the quick laugh has a history of bringing dreams to fruition. In the 1980s, after a violent stand-off on the reservation among factions with differing political and philosophical view, he founded a low-watt radio station to serve as a common information source.
That station is now CKON, a financially self sufficient, 24-hour news and entertaiment provider, ad the only native-nation-licensed radio stsation east of the Mississippi, reaching listeners from Canton to Ottawa.
Standing by his giant tanks looking forward to the day he is able to reach in and hand a fresh fish to a customer, Mr. Benedict is philosophical about his community’s history and his business approach.
“You take something bad and turn it into an economic opportunity. That’s something Americans and Mohawks are very good at,” he said, laughing. “I think you learned it from us.”
Aquaculture Tanks Making a Difference Part 2
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Watertown Daily Times
July 29, 2001
Entrepreneur Aims To ‘Speed Grow’ Fish To Help Mohawks Return To Traditional Diet
By Eliza Bettinger Part 2
Near the reedy shore where Mr. Benedict’s grandmother once fished, six half acre ponds and two ware house-like buildings have appeared.
In the ponds swarm schools of inch-long perch hatchlings. Larger fish circle in cauldron like tanks bubbling with pumped in oxygen, which fill the smaller of the two buildings.
Some of the swimming protein sources are finally mature at 5 years old. They date back to Mr. Benedict’s fisrt efforts at fish farming, a business dominated by Southern entrepreneurs and their balmy year round ponds. In Tennessee and Georgia fish grow to maturity outdoors over several years—there are not insulated buildings and equipment to construct, no water-warming and refreshing and aerating to worry about.
But in the St. Lawrence River valley, Mr. Benedict discovered, you can’t make a living with such a large capital investment when fish take so long to grow.
“We said, ‘Throw that book out; we need something else,” he said.
Then he heard something interesting through his network of industry and academic contacts he had collected during his years of trying to fin-tune his system: There was a man in Maryland who thought he had a way to grow fish to maturity in a year.
A few weeks later Mr. Benedict was visiting the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, and he liked what he found there.
The cutting-edge equipment now being assembled inside Mr. Benedict’s largest building is modeled after “opposing flow” technology Rick Sheriff used to raise tilapia a popular market fish.
The key to the system is that water will be forced into a one-way flow down the long tanks, compelling fish to exercise vigorously and continually.
“We are sending these fish to the gym. They are going to be in a health spa. Everything is optimum, ultimate for growth,” Mr. Benedict said.
As especially effective filtration system is the technology’s second great stride. In Mr. Benedict’s current system, fresh water is continually pumped in to get rid of waste in the tank; in winter, the water also must be warmed to the correct temperature.
The new system uses a built-in semi-automatic filter to recirculate the water, cutting costs and increasing efficiency.
All of this automation and integration of parts makes daily operation easier, Mr. Benedict said.
“This is Henry Ford’s Model T,” he said. “The first vehicle that you don’t have to be a mechanic in order to drive it. A vehicle for the masses.”
And the masses are ready to get in on the action. Mr. Benedict says he has been receiving calls from Europeans and South Americans who want to visit his operation once it is up and running. Academics from Canada and the United States also are clamoring to work with Ekohawk—and share their research funds with the business—to apply what Mr. Benedict is learning to development of more aquaculture businesses in Northern climates.
Aquaculture Tanks Making a Difference Part 1
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Watertown Daily Times
July 29, 2001
Entrepreneur Aims To ‘Speed Grow’ Fish To Help Mohawks Return To Traditional Diet
By Eliza Bettinger Part 1
Cornwall Island Ontario—The wind whips up tiny whitecaps on the St. Lawrence River, and in the distance sun glints off trucks crossing Seaway International Bridge as Lloyd W. Benedict points to the reedy shoreline of his property on the south side of Cornwall Island.
“I can see my grandmother, back when this was a hay field wearing her straw hat, going down to the river with a pole and a bucket to catch us lunch. Now that is a perfect childhood’ he said.
Perch and walleye, bass and trout – the protein foundation of a Mohawk diet as old as the territory of Akwesasne. “Then when I got older, I would go down here, I would catch some beautiful fish. I’d take them to my mother, and she would say, “We can’t eat those fish.”
That memory has fueled the determined man’s six-year effort to develop an economically viable way to farm fish on the banks of the cold St. Lawrence. This summer, a cutting-edge prototype that speeds the growth of market fish to a quarter of the normal maturation time will go into operation at Mr. Benedict’s company Ekohawk.
The operation will be only the second of it’s kind in the world—but most important to Mr. Benedict is the chance to revisit the meals that his grandparents enjoyed.
PCBs and heavy metals from the Canadian and American industries sandwiching the Mohawk territory have poisoned one of the communty’s primary food sources. Cancer, hormone disorders, brain damage—continue to fish and take your pick of maladies, residents have learned. And since the early 1980s, a transition to standard American eating habits – high fat protein sources, lots more sugar and starches is more or less complete. These new eating habits weren’t due just to the loss of fish. Subsistence farming in much of the territory was obliterated in the 1970s by fluoride poisoning from nearby aluminum smelters. And construction of the St. Lawernce Seaway and the International Bridge in the 1950s hastened assimilation of the community into nearby towns, All the changes added up to the community’s invasion by a new debilitatior: diabetes.
“Food is physical, but it’s also a social structure, a culture; it’s what you do—you go out fishing or hunting or farming. When you move away from that, yoy not only stress the social structure of the community, you stress the physical body,” Mr. Benedict said.
Diabetes is rampant I Indian country. Fifty percent of American Indians over age 45 develop the disease, according to the National Institutes of Health. Experts lay much of the blame on genetics, coupled with changes in eating habits.
Mr. Benedict has his own interpretation.
“Our people are adapted to eating one type of food, the way they have for thousands of years. Europeans, they are a mobile people, a colonizing people—they’re adapted to food changes. In another few hundred years, our people would adapt, evolve to the changes,. But we don’t do that anymore. You don’t just let people get sick ad die,” he said.
Ekohawk is Mr. Benedict’s solution.