Fish farm reinvents the eel

Editor’s note: This is one in a series of features profiling all sorts of enterprises, from fish farmers to tequila makers, as part of Small Business Week, Oct. 17-23. The other features can be found at Saltwire.com. bspurr@herald.ca @BillSpurr

One thing that standing on the shoreline with a net, dipping for eels does is give people time to plan.

In 1995, Roland Hamilton had a net. Today, Hamilton Eel Company is the parent of eight divisions, including the Annapolis golf course, two restaurants, a construction business and Hamilton’s Fish Farm.

The Centrelea farm was established four years ago with three people and a couple of used tanks bought on Kijiji. Now, there are 16 employees, a cluster of large buildings and 70,000 rainbow trout at various stages of growth.

The land-based fish farm uses a recirculating aquaculture system.

“What that means is we draw fresh well water from the ground, it gets degassed, it circulates through the tanks, gets cleaned and goes back, so it’s a closed loop. We control our environment so we don’t have to use antibiotics or growth hormone,” said Wes Hearn, sales and processing manager.

“It’s a natural rainbow trout.”

The business plan calls for Hamilton’s Fish Farm to have 30 employees in 10 buildings in a few years. Hiring of people with plumbing or carpentry skills is done locally. The philosophy is to learn by doing.

“None of us here on the farm has any formal training in aquaculture,” said Hearn, who used to work with the county in water treatment.

General manager Sunny White was a burner mechanic.

At first, “everything was done wrong” and the water looked like chocolate milk. Now, using medical-grade oxygen equipment, each tank is filtered 24 times a day and the water is tested three times a day.

The company’s first sale was to the Foodland in Annapolis Royal, an order for six whole fish. During a recent week, 4,000 pounds of trout left for Clearwater’s operations in Ontario, Sobeys stores throughout Atlantic Canada and Coleman’s in Newfoundland.

“It was a struggle at first because rainbow trout wasn’t known; salmon was what buyers were looking for,” White said.

“We’ve come a long way in a short amount of time.”

Growing rainbow trout, the eggs for which come from Washington State, is a “training wheels” program for the company and the facility, which plans to first convert to striped bass and then eventually concentrate on eels.

Hamilton Eel has been shipping eels to China for more than 25 years.

“We still do that, but over the last five or six years we’ve seen the market open up in the United States, so we’re thinking about selling to the States instead of overseas,”

White said.

“Every spring we harvest eels for three months. When we’re harvesting eels it’s 40 hours here and 40 hours there, three to four hours sleep a night.”

Baby eels, called elvers, are fished at night, still using a dip net, in brackish water in the Sissiboo and near Meteghan. They are held at a plant in Granville and shipped live to China, where they mature and are then sold to sushi chefs.

“An elver is this big,” Hearn said, holding his thumb and finger a few inches apart.

“It takes 5,500 to make a kilo, so what we do is keep them alive and ship them and they grow them out over there. They grow them to (make) kabayaki, which is about a pound and a half.”

Hamilton Eel has an annual quota of 900 kilograms but typically can only fill about three quarters of it. The company thinks the growing Asian population in Canada will lead to an eel market here.

In the meantime, incremental growth in the rainbow trout program continues.

The industry is regulated by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and provincial government vets. Hamilton’s Oceanwise-certified program grows rainbow trout from eggs to filleting size – three and a half to four pounds – in 24 months, and the goal is to increase efficiency by 50 per cent.

White and Hearn had to learn how to gut and fillet fish themselves before they could teach others. They taught themselves by watching YouTube.

“And lots of practice.”

Sales are a bit higher during barbecue season, and about 95 per cent of their trout is delivered fresh.

“We have the capability, and we do have customers that prefer it frozen, but that would be smaller quantities,” Hearn said.

Fish food used to come from Middleton, two bags at a time. Now it arrives from British Columbia on an 18-wheeler, two or three times a month, more than 120 tons of feed a year.

Bones are turned into fertilizer and the guts sold to lobster fishermen. The waste the fish generate is sold at local Home Hardware stores as a plant enrichment product.

“One day the waste will be worth more than the fillets,” said White.

“Now, we’re making some money from it rather than paying to get it disposed of.”