Ask Leo Ray about developing new markets for his specialty seafood and his answer is not about raceways—it is about roadways.

Leo Ray, right in photo, harvests his specialty crops not from the land, but from Idaho's waters. He ships catfish, sturgeon, tilapia, rainbow trout, and alligator meat throughout the West. UI extension educator Gary Fornshell, left in photo, has been instrumental in providing the research tools to succeed. Photo: © Pam Benham. All rights reserved.

“The first thing I do is find out how I’m going to get the product there,” says the Buhl-area aquacultural pioneer whose reputation has traveled well beyond his markets. During three decades of releasing one new product after another, Ray has learned that three things sell specialty seafood—price, product quality, and service quality—but in the reverse order.

“In a commodity, price is critical,” Ray says. “But in introducing a new product, you need a broad profit margin to cover the mistakes that you’ll inevitably make. If you’re dependent on a price buyer, you won’t succeed. You need to sell to a market that is willing to pay you for the quality of your service.”

Twice a week, Ray’s staff at Fish Processors, Inc., put his catfish, sturgeon, tilapia, rainbow trout, and alligator meat on refrigerated trucks headed all over the West. Most of those products will be unloaded at small markets serving ethnic consumers. Ray advises newcomers to agriculture to consider the “tremendous” potential of immigrant, ethnic, and even regional Anglo-American markets.

“People say that if you don’t inherit a farm, you can’t go into agriculture today, but that’s bull,” he says. “What you’ve got to do is grow crops and items that nobody else will grow. If it’s edible, somebody will eat it. And if it’s wearable, somebody will wear it.”

While the average American now eats about 15 pounds of fish a year—5 pounds more than 30 years ago—Ray attributes the increase almost entirely to the 60 to 70 pounds of seafood immigrants consume each year. In response to their preference for native foods, he sells them his products any way they want them: his blue and channel catfish, for example, are available gutted, pan-ready, and filleted.

“People say that if you don’t inherit a farm, you can’t go into agriculture today, but that’s bull. What you’ve got to do is grow crops and items that nobody else will grow. If it’s edible, somebody will eat it. And if it’s wearable, somebody will wear it.”

But Ray says “if there is anything I’ve done better than anyone else in the fish industry, it’s use the university system.” Prospective producers of specialty foods “will not be confident if they have to depend on their competition for information,” he says. “That’s what extension is for—to supply the information that people need to get started.”

When Ray decided to bite off a piece of the U.S. Southeast’s alligator market, he gave UI Extension aquaculture educator Gary Fornshell a call. Fornshell, former aquaculture research facility manager at Mississippi State University and a graduate of Auburn University’s aquaculture program, knew where to get the information Ray needed. And when Ray decided to convert his earthen ponds to concrete raceways, he used state guidelines for plans and specifications that Fornshell was instrumental in developing.

If he decides to start growing tropical fish—which he says he may do “as soon as I get the time”—Ray will depend heavily on research currently under way at the UI’s Hagerman Fish Culture Experiment Station. “That’s the way it should work,” he says. “If the researchers provide the technical information on a new product, and if the extension educators help people get started, then we can have an industry in this state that’s as big as potatoes.”

Ron Hardy, director of the aquaculture center at Hagerman, is comparing 40 to 50 varieties of tropical fish for their abilities to thrive and multiply in Idaho waters. Incomes from tropical fish can be 20 times higher than those for food fish, he says. As a result, interest in the tropical fish market is heating up. “The physical asset of our fish farmers is their water,” says Hardy, “and one of our roles is to help them figure out how best to use it.”

While most of the springs used by Idaho fish farmers are a constant 59 degrees Fahrenheit—perfect for trout—some are geothermally heated. Ray’s artesian wells, for example, bubble up 90- to 95-degree water.

Hardy and his associates also have conducted diet and growth enhancement trials with sturgeon.

Other research at the center—conducted by both UI and USDA Agricultural Research Service scientists—has contributed significantly to cutting the amount of phosphorus in fish-farm wastewater in half. Modified rainbow trout diets developed at the facility maximize the percentage of dietary phosphorus absorbed by trout and minimize the amount that is excreted into the environment.

Recently, the aquaculture scientists also began developing blends of fishmeal and low-phosphorus grains. Using these grain blends not only protects water quality, but it protects trout farmers from riding the waves of variable fishmeal supplies and prices.

The Hagerman center develops fish as well as fishmeal. Its researchers are harnessing the power of molecular biology to select improved strains of rainbow trout that will grow rapidly, resist disease, and use the new diets efficiently. Should Idaho producers decide to dive into tropical fish production, geneticists at the center will help them make sure their breeding stock is disease-free.

Currently, Fornshell is assisting in the development of organic standards for the U.S. aquaculture industry. “It’s a challenge,” he says of his work for the National Organic Standards Board. “An organic farm has to have control over its inputs, but how can you control an aquifer, an ocean, or the fish used in the fishmeal you buy for your trout?”

But the working group of which he is a member is making progress against the tide, and Fornshell believes organic fish products soon may be another niche Idaho producers can fill.
With supplies of fresh water limited, and with environmental constraints reining in the numbers of fish that each rearing facility can produce, Idaho’s fish farmers are not looking to increased production to increase their profitability. Within the dominant trout industry, they are finding convenience-oriented niche markets for oven-ready products, boneless fillets, smoked seafood, and jerky.

Now that New York Post gossip columnist Liz Smith is wearing a jacket made from one of his alligator hides, Ray is getting ready to grapple still another new opportunity. “There are 1,100 Russians living in Boise,” he says, “and they are wanting caviar.”

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