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.

Continued from Aquaculture Tanks in the News – Part 1

“I invested much time and money in the project in the beginning If the fish died, I had to examine the design of the system to determine what was wrong and make changes,” Mr. Sheriff said. “It takes six months for the system to run to determine if it will work, and then the changes have to be made, and the process starts over.”

He invested nearly $750,000 dollars in Delmarva Fisheries including costs for the land, building, tanks, fish and supplies. In two years, Mr. Sheriff expects to receive the money back that he has invested by grossing between $450,000 – $500,000 per year.

The fishery requires little maintenance, such as cleaning the filters, filling the automatic feeders and sizing the fish for sale.

“Determination and investment money are the two main requirements for beginning a fish farm,” added Mr. Sheriff.

After obtaining a patent on his system, Mr. Sheriff began marketing his innovation under the name of Opposing Flows Technology. The manufacturing of the systems is performed at his business in Federalsburg.

Mr. Castle also encouraged him to begin selling the systems to boost the aquacultural industry. “It was not my intention to sell the tanks, only the fish, but it became a side business nearly two years ago,” Mr. Sheriff said. “The Department of Aquaculture refers people to me who are interested in beginning their own fisheries.”

He has built 60 tanks so far, constituting an average of ten farms sold in Maryland, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Mr. Sheriff worked as an engineer for the University of Maryland the 1980s. From there he became an industrial fabricator. Most recently, he was a Project Engineer for the W.R. Chemical Co. in Baltimore. He resides in Kent Island and commutes to Dorchester County.

“Delmarva Fisheries has exceeded my expectations, and I am pleased with the way things are going. Both the tanks and the fishery are nice businesses,” Mr. Sheriff said. “Those in the aquaculture industry are not really farmers, we are entrepreneurs.

HURLOCK—With the uncertain future of the seafood industry, many measures have been taken to preserve the heritage and the availability of seafood.  Aquacultural farming is one of the measures taken to ensure a fish harvest.  Delmarva Fisheries of Hurlock is owned by Rick Sheriff, and is one of the few fish farms in Maryland.

On Mr. Sheriff’s farm, various fish are harvested, including large-mouth bass, tilapia hybrid blue gills and yellow perch which are all sold as food fish.  Yellow perch is mainly carried to the Great Lake region near Ontario, where it is the predominate fish harvested from Lake Erie.  The other fish are sold to the Asian market around China Town in New York and in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Sheriff said, “When I began growing fish, there were only three other fish farms in Maryland, each with a different technological system.”

In 1990, he began researching the aquacultural industry after being prompted by a friend, Maryland State Director of Aquaculture Roy Castle.  In an attempt to save the seafood industry and heritage of Maryland, the Department of Aquaculture was developed as a subsidiary of the Department of Agriculture.

“Roy and I have been friends for years, and he sparked my interest in the industry,” Mr. Sheriff said.  “Roy built and promoted the growth of the industry in Maryland, and if not for him, there would not be a fish farm in the state.”

After researching the industry, Mr. Sheriff entered the extensive and expensive trial – and – error period until 1995 when he developed the system he uses today.  The system is operated by two opposing flows of water and the tanks are made of marine-grade aluminum.  The tanks can hold 12,000 gallons of water and 5,000 pounds of fish each.

Next, consider the property location. What climate zone is the property in, and how will that affect the species to be raised. For example, you would not want to try and raise a cool water species like yellow perch in a hot zone of the country like Texas. The cost of cooling all that water would greatly affect the business’s profitability. A better choice would be red drum, which is a warm water species.

What about the market for the given species? Where is this market at, how large of a volume is moved and at what price? Generally, the farther the farm is away from the market the lower the farm price will be.

After you have identified your species you need to find a reliable source of fingerlings for grow out or a separate hatchery on site to produce your own.

Once you have answered these questions you have to decide what type of aquaculture you would like to do, outside ponds, flow through, or recirculating. Generally speaking, out side ponds safely do 5000 pounds to the acre of water, so a million pound farm would require 200 acres of water or about 300 acres of land. This is a very expensive way to with land cost, the building of levees, large wells, underground plumbing, etc. Flow through systems require some sort of containment in conjunction with very large pumps to move the water. The water also need to be enriched with liquid oxygen. This is a very expensive system to operate costing well over a dollar per pound of fish to produce. Recirculating systems have the lowest capital cost of the three. They also have the lowest operational cost. The same one million pounds of fish can be raised in a one-acre building. They also require less water. The same one million pounds of fish per year in a pond system would use 264 million gallons, in a flow through system it would use sixteen billion gallons, a recirculation system would use seven million gallons per year. Recirculation systems are the greenest and most profitable way to produce fish and here at Aquaculture Tanks we can provide you with everything you will need to get started fish farming.