For the next story of our Grown IN Indiana series, we visit one of the oldest private fish farms in the country. It raises millions of goldfish and koi.
Kathie Wilson remembers getting goldfish from the fair when she was a young girl. Maybe it was from the game where you try to toss a ping pong ball into a bowl, or the ring toss, she can't remember.
The Ozark farm, which got its start as Grassyfork Fisheries in 1899, produces multiple types of goldfish and even a couple different kinds of koi. He first discovered the vibrant fish himself when the world’s fair came to the region in the 1890s. He was fascinated, Wilson said, captivated even. But sources in the U.S. for goldfish, which were becoming a novelty, were limited.“He knew he couldn’t do row crops in that area," Cleveland said,"but water was pretty abundant.”, he bought 200 breeding goldfish.
There are a lot of ways to measure size: revenue, number of fish, acreage, etc. Cleveland boils it down to something more basic: “We’re the largest with what we do.” “We are like the Fords and the Chevys,” the fourth-generation fish farmer said. “You can buy Bentleys and BMWs, but we are going for more of a really pretty fish that’s really good quality and at a good price for people.”
Starting late in the spring, once the waters reach a certain temperature, it’s spawning time. The brood fish are moved to large tanks — the very tanks that Wilson’s father helped build on the farm — where they release their eggs over a short period of time. Mats at the bottom of the tank catch the eggs so they can be moved into the hatchery to what are essentially incubator tanks, Wilson said.
There are roughly 300 ponds, each about an acre in size, across the farms in Martinsville. They stretch around trees and some are hidden behind little hills — from atop one, the ponds look almost like a coloring book crisply penciled in with varying shades of muted blues and greens. The small walkways in between become the borders to stay within, and if you zoomed out you’d expect to see a shape take form.Those ponds are where the fish are raised for the next few weeks and months.
It takes about 60 to 90 days before the fish come to sellable size, Cleveland said. That’s also the same timeframe when they start to develop their distinct coloring based on sunlight, water temperature and food.From ponds to people's homesWorkers donning waders — some knee-high and some chest-high, all seemingly part of the uniform to work there — will collect the fish from the ponds. They range from about four to six feet deep, and each pond has a number.
Last year, Ozark hatched just over 100 million baby fish, Cleveland said. By the time it comes to harvesting, however, only about 25% of those fish have survived. That’s not unusual — they might be eaten by herons, snakes, turtles and other critters. Still, the farm is always trying to do what they can to help more fish survive.
They can ship as many as a couple hundred small fish or one fish as big as 18 inches in a single package. Anything bigger than that needs to be picked up, said Wilson, the packaging and shipping is her expertise. “People don’t think about the aquaculture industry at all in Indiana,” Cleveland said, “because it’s an inland state.” But it’s actually happening more than most Hoosiers might think — there are four other small fish farms operating just around Martinsville.
An indoor farm in northeast Indiana grows the country’s first bio-engineered salmon. And a farm in central Indiana that started by raising largemouth bass outdoors added a new indoor facility in recent years to grow barramundi indoors. An Australian fish, the barramundi require a warm, climate-controlled environment.In addition to these food fish, Indiana also has farmers growing other fish primarily for game-fishing and others for bait.
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