Partners #13 - 1890 Land-Grant Universities
Building a Better Fish-Web Script  8/1/05

Steeve Pomerleau:
The Delta country is a beautiful land in a natural state. We have a lot of water.  It’s a flat land.  We don’t see a lot of mountains but we have a lot of river and lakes where we can do a lot of hunting and fishing.  Fishing is really part of the culture here in Arkansas.  We also have a lot of agriculture-cotton…rice…soybeans, corn  

Narrator:
Steeve Pomerleau is a research assistant with the University of Arkansas-Pine Bluff or UAPB.  Most of his time in spent in the field working on the 1890 land-grant’s bait fish verification program. The project’s goal is to verify the recommendations for effective aquaculture based on the university’s research findings.

Steeve Pomerleau:
Most of the research conducted at UAPB is done in small research ponds of about a tenth or quarter acres as opposed to commercial farms which are over ten acres. So we want to apply the results of the research conducted at the university, and apply those results to commercial scale ponds.

Narrator:
One of the producers that Steeve is working with is Harold Saul, a second generation fish farmer.  Together, they have tackled some difficult problems, helping Harold stay profitable in the competitive world of bait fish production.

Harold Saul:
Looks like fifty!

Steeve Pomerleau: 
I love the personal interaction with the farmers and really being able to help farmers and keeping them in business.  This is all what it’s about.

Harold Saul: 
What they’ve done for us is to take out a lot of the guesswork.  With the verification program, what they’ve done-they’ve got us more accuracy.  Coming up with better feeds, better formulas for feeds for us to feed our fish, and grow our fish more economically.  Naturally, if we can get more production out of less feed-the better.

They are the only research center in Arkansas that we can get a verification on our fish to be safe to ship out of state.  And if we can’t ship out of state, we’re out of business.  It’s that simple.

Narrator:
The bait fish verification program that Harold and others are involved with is based on the work of Nathan Stone and others at UAPB.  The team has done extensive research with a fish called the Golden Shiner.  Nathan is now turning his attention to the Rosy Red minnow.

Nathan Stone: 
The rosy reds are an orange color with little pinky tones to them.  They have a white to a silvery underbelly.  We’d like to have nutritionally sound brooders and then that would transfer into larger eggs, harder quality eggs and better fry.  A fry is the little baby fish, the one that just hatches from the egg.

We’re hoping that it will reduce their costs and make it more efficient. The spawning-rearing pond method-you get a mix of sizes and it’s fairly inefficient.  With a jar-hatching, we can turn out even aged-fish that go into the feeder market or be a lot more predictable for producers.

Narrator:
For some, this exceptional effort may appear disproportionate for simply meeting the leisurely needs of Arkansas’s anglers. But the economic impact goes way beyond the fish farms and riverbanks of the state. 

Nathan Stone:
Arkansas is the leading producer of farm-raised bait fish in the United States - about $23 million dollars by the census of aquaculture. But there’s a multiplier effect of 6-7 fold here in the local community.  It creates a lot of jobs.  The feeds that go into baitfish like soybean meal and cottonseed meal are products that are raised here in Arkansas.  And of course there’s a 10-15 fold economic multiplier when you go to retail markets. So it generates a lot of income.

There’s been very fast adoption of the practices from our research recommendations.  And also the farms are very progressive.  And so some of the yields and some of the survivals have been excellent and we really depend on USDA and CSREES for the funding and the research support.  It’s matched by state dollars here in Arkansas.  And that’s really enabled us to support our stakeholders of fish farmers here in Arkansas.  It’s really what the purpose of a land-grant is and that’s what we’re doing.