Tecumseh Herald, 16 February 2011
Matt Osburn has been a fisherman all his life. When his long-time friend, Kent Herrick, asked him to manage the Aquaculture Research Corporation facility at 105 E. Russell Road, he was happy to accept. Osburn also works as an EMT with the Tecumseh Fire Department.
“Kent saw a need for this, and obviously he isn’t able to be on-site every day,” said Osburn. The nonprofit Aquaculture Research Corporation, funded by the Herrick Foundation, has been growing through its first three-and-a-half years with additional support in the research venture through such institutions as the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, the Toledo Zoo, and the Michigan Aquaculture Association. The ultimate goal is to raise healthy, sustainable, homegrown seafood and make it available to restaurants, grocery stores and individuals.
Kenneth Herrick once kept an automobile collection in the large pole barn next to the fire station, but it has been renovated so it could be a sanitary facility to grow yellow perch in tanks. On Monday and Tuesday this week, the corporation opened its doors to welcome Tecumseh Middle School Science students from Joe Bundas’ and Kristen Hess’s classes for a tour. Osburn’s daughter, Amanda, is a seventh grader who enjoys helping with the water chemistry and feeding operations, and he said when conversations turned to aquaculture, the idea of a tour came about.
“Since we are a nonprofit we’ve got to concentrate on other things besides making money,” said Osburn. “We focus on science, education and future jobs as we grow. This is the first group of kids that have come to visit besides some firemen’s kids, and we hope to be able to continue that from an education aspect.”
Osburn showed the students some tanks where the company grows its own rotifers, the first food for the fish, since they can’t just go and bring in food from outdoors, because it would also bring in pollutants and viruses they are trying to avoid. He explained how a female could produce from 30,000-35,000 eggs and there are 75 females in each tank for brood stock.
“We couldn’t begin to grow that many fish here right now,” Osburn said.
The kids laughed as Osburn sprinkled a food purchased from Purina into a large tank holding 300 of the two-year-old yellow perch, because the fish quickly rose to the surface to feed, sending splashes all along the tank.
“We’ve learned that fish are calmer under blue LED lights and grow faster,” Osburn told the students.
He said the group is hoping to be able to have some fish ready for market about a year from now. “We’re getting ready to do a second batch of eggs, possibly in March, and hopefully 10 months to a year after that, we should be ready.”
Osburn said that the water is just city water, however it is taken through a filtering system to take out the chlorine that is bad for fish.
Yellow perch was selected, because it is a favorite in the area. They considered walleye, but Osburn said the fish are a bit carnivorous, and also can grow quite large. Other fish they may be looking at in the future are tilapia, saugeye, smelt, and striped bass.
There are no plans to grow fish such as salmon at this time, because they require large facilities since they grow so large, though there are groups in the country that are doing it.
“It seems like everybody is interested in something like this,” said Osburn. “The United States imports most of its seafood from overseas — and it’s still growing outdoors where there can be pollutants — when people are out of work in Michigan. Doing this, we can address pollution, overfishing, cost, safety, less time to the plate, and water quality.”
Osburn received his initial training at Virginia Tech, and went through a program developed at Cornell University. “Those were just to learn the basics,” he said. He also spent some time with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to learn to tell when a female was ready to give up her eggs and how to facilitate that process, and through visiting various programs and other aquaculture facilities around the country. “I’ve learned an awful lot along the way.” A lot of that knowledge has come through learning what has to be done and then doing it, he said.
Source: Tecumseh Herald
