- Welcome everyone. My name's Ian Meeker.
I work with the University of Wisconsin Extension
as the 4H Youth Development Educator for Bayfield County
and it's my pleasure to introduce to you Greg Fischer.
Greg lives in the town of Washburn just north of here
and he is the Facilities Manager for
the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point's
Aquaculture Demonstration Facility.
And he's going to tell you all the current research
that they're doing up at that facility
and how it impacts aquaculture
across the state and across the country
and even across the world.
So, Greg, come on up.
(applause)
- Thanks, Ian. So I was asked to come here tonight
to talk a little bit about aquaculture and also explain
about the Northern Aquaculture Demonstration Facility.
So with that, I'm going to move forward here.
So what is aquaculture and aquaponics?
By definition, aquaculture is the rearing of aquatic animals
fish and crustaceans under controlled conditions
in various systems like ponds or indoor tanks.
Sometimes aquaculture is called fish farming.
You may have heard that out and about
when you're talking to people and somebody talks about
a fish farm or fish farming or fish hatchery.
Aquaponics is the rearing of
fish and plants together in a closed system.
That's kind of a very old system
that's been practiced for many, many years.
It goes all the way back to early Egypt and the Chinese
but recently we've seen a resurgence in aquaponics.
So what does aquaculture mean to us
and how does it affect us?
A lot of you in the audience are probably thinking
that aquaculture doesn't affect me.
How many of you go fishing?
Quite a few of you.
Do any of you use fresh bait or live bait?
Some of you. So that's aquaculture.
In Wisconsin, the bait that's reared
that is sold at the bait shops is reared and certified.
In fact that's why bait costs quite a bit more now
than it used to.
I don't know if you guys remember, you probably do,
you used to be able to get
about a dozen minnows for a buck.
How much are a dozen minnows now?
They're about seven to eight dollars for a dozen minnows.
It's because of that certification
and the process involved with rearing.
How about aquariums?
If you have goldfish or fish in your aquariums,
those often times can come from aquaculture.
There's a huge goldfish farm in Pennsylvania
that raises goldfish, they ship around the world.
They ship them to China,
they ship them to other places in Europe.
A lot of it is the fancy goldfish
and they spend millions and millions of dollars
shipping those and selling those.
People spend millions and millions of dollars
for those goldfish.
Sport fish is another aquaculture use that we see.
We have sport fish that are stocked into our lakes
and rivers by Natural Resource agencies
and we go out and fish for those and hopefully catch them.
If not, it's just called fishing not catching, right?
The last one is my favorite. That's fresh fish to eat.
The one in the picture there is not for eating.
That's a bait fish.
I like the fresh fish to eat the most
and aquaculture is really a great place
to get fresh fish to eat on a regular basis.
This is a nice picture, a little dark here
for you guys to see, but that's a lake trout.
That's out in the Apostle Islands,
just a little short drive north of here.
And that's a nice lake trout that we caught out fishing.
That young man is from Japan, he never fished before
in his life and so he's pretty excited.
I think he's more excited about taking it home and eating it
than he was about catching it.
Aquaculture, it happens every day.
That's kind of my take home message tonight
is that you are affected by aquaculture all the time.
How many of you happen to have a fish pond or a pond at home
that you would like to have fish in?
At least one. I know that.
And this is a good example of a fishing pond.
This young lady from Germany who never fished before
caught that largemouth bass
out of a small fishing pond and she loved it.
This is one of my favorites, of course.
Not only is this my youngest daughter but she gives us
an A-plus for a consumer taste test on walleye
that have been reared in our fish hatchery and fried up
on a Friday night for a Friday night fish fry.
I'm sure everybody sitting here can remember
the Friday night fish fry and hopefully enjoy it
tomorrow night, which is Friday night.
A couple facts that I'd like to share with you,
currently more than 90% of the seafood eaten by Americans
is imported from other countries.
That's astounding when I think about that.
We're importing all this seafood especially in Wisconsin
where we're surrounded by water and right here we have
Lake Superior out the back door, that just blows me away.
Fewer fossil fuels are used to bring local fish
to your table whether they're wild caught or farmed,
so that's very important to think about that.
The other thing is by purchasing local fish
from Wisconsin farmers and Great Lakes commercial fishermen,
you also are keeping your food dollars close to home
and you're supporting local family businesses.
That's huge and I think that's something
that we need to think about whenever
we go out and purchase fish or seafood.
If you can get it locally it's going to be better.
It's better for you. It's also fresh.
It's going to taste better and that's really important.
Approximately half of the seafood worldwide
is raised on farms and this is because a lot of the harvest
in the capture fisheries has peaked globally and I'm going
to talk a little bit more about that in a minute.
But because of this, aquaculture is being recognized
as a valuable and important way to raise fish
and seafood for us to eat.
Aquaculture is the fastest growing form
of food production in the world.
It's the fastest growing agricultural program
in the world and it ranks number one in the midwest.
Excuse me, Wisconsin ranks number one in the midwest.
So if we look at this on a global perspective
and we look at the capture production
which is shown in the lower part of this graph
compared to aquaculture production
and it's a little darker on the upper part of the graph.
Aquaculture production is overtaking capture production
and we're seeing that more and more.
As you can notice, the capture production has kind of
leveled off if I can get my little curser to work.
Capture production has leveled off and even decreased
in some locales due to a variety of reasons,
but aquaculture production is increasing.
If we look at the world's population and how...
The population is increasing all the time
and our food supply is increasing
it's very important to think about where are we going to get
this added protein for our diets, this added fish.
Fish is really becoming a sought after resource
and the capture fisheries just can't keep up with that.
If you think about it and if we look at this graph
a little bit, if we look back into the 1950s and the 1960s,
a lot of stocks that were under exploited down in here,
as we have moved forward over time,
they've become exploited, over exploited
and some of them have even crashed now.
So now that we're into the 2015 this number here,
32% of stocks had collapsed as of 2003.
That's probably higher now.
So the world's capture fishery has been exploited.
It is starting to crash.
We're seeing that happening worldwide,
so we've got to find a source for that protein
and a source for those fish to feed the growing population.
So aquaculture really is starting to shine.
Aquaculture output is expected to rise
over 33% in the next decade and it's going to help
meet a demand for healthy fish and healthy food
as some of the fishing, the capture fishing, is stagnating.
If we look over at this little thing here,
farm fish to exceed wild fish
in human consumption by the year 2018.
I actually think we have exceeded that.
I thought I saw something in the news recently
that said we've either exceeded or we've
at least matched it so we're ahead of the curve right now.
And this one here really scares me.
Tainted seafood reaching the U.S.
Some of these are blurbs and things taken
off of the paper or off of television
but tainted seafood reaching the U.S.,
that's becoming more and more of a problem.
I don't know if any of you saw there was a big special,
I'm trying to think what TV station or what, who carried it,
but it was about mislabeling of fish
and they found that very high numbers like 70 or 80% of
the fish are mislabeled that we eat at restaurants and that
we eat out, when we're out eating fish at different places.
And what's happening is that fish are being
captured overseas or in other locales, they're cheap,
they're shipped over here, they're being sold cheaply
so the restaurants are buying them and
instead of offering you walleye for $19 a pound,
they're offering you walleye for $7.99 all you can eat.
And if you can get walleye for $7.99 all you can eat,
it's not walleye. It's probably something from Europe
like a zander or a European walleye
and it doesn't taste the same as our walleye
and it's not farmed the same and it's not captured the same,
doesn't have the same attributes
that our walleye would have.
So just buyer beware, I guess is the saying.
If we look at some of this,
how it's affecting our food choices and what's happening,
there's a lot of awareness in food now.
People are starting to be more concerned about
what they're eating and where they're eating.
I don't ever remember when I was younger
my parents asking a waitress, you know, well,
"Where did that cow come from?" or
"Where did that lettuce come from?" or
"Where did that fish come from?"
But now we're starting to see things like this.
We have the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch
and if you notice here they have as best choices,
they have arctic char farmed. Hmm, interesting.
Bass, striped, farmed. Hmm.
If you go down a little bit
they've got rainbow trout, farmed.
So under their best choices they have a lot of farmed fish.
They also have, for you folks that are looking
for something to eat, Lake Superior whitefish,
which is a capture fishery out here. It's local, right?
And so the farm raised fish and the local fish are doing
very well on the Monterey Bay Aquaculture Seafood Watch.
I think the take home message from this slide is,
again, to be aware of what you're eating and
think about what you're eating and
think about the fish where it's coming from.
So, I've had a lot of discussions
with people about aquaculture.
I've had people tell me aquaculture is bad.
It pollutes the environment.
It releases animals that don't belong into the environment.
It causes pollution.
A lot of issues with aquaculture, they'd say,
so they don't support aquaculture.
I'm not eating a farm raised fish.
Tastes like liver, that's what I hear a lot of.
Tastes like other things.
So I have a couple things for those people.
Usually I invite them up and have a fish fry and I say,
"So tell me which fish is farm raised
and which one is wild caught"?
And most of the time I can trick them so they can't tell.
Our farm raised fish is wonderful.
I've eaten wild caught fish for a long time
and the farm raised fish we raise,
if it's taken care of correctly, is wonderful.
The other thing is that a lot of these horror stories
we hear about are related to net pen culture
usually on the East coast or maybe the West coast.
And we're pretty far away from that here in the Midwest
so we are kind of,
we don't hear all of the stories, we don't hear everything.
We just hear little bits and pieces on the news
like net pen falls apart due to heavy waves
and fish are released all over and
the officials are upset because of this or something.
You don't hear the whole story.
But you know, one of the cool things is there is no
net pen fish farming in Wisconsin.
We don't have it.
I don't see it coming to Wisconsin any time soon.
It's just not on the docket. It's not being discussed.
The fish in Wisconsin are raised in four ways.
We have flow-through water going through
something called like a raceway or an outdoor pond
where there's lots of water flowing though
and you'd have fish like rainbow trout
or brook trout maybe in that water.
This is really common if you go up to any of our hatcheries,
our state hatcheries, federal hatcheries, tribal hatcheries.
A lot of them have flow-through tanks
and the water's rushing through.
It's a single pass usage. It's really clean.
This picture here that's on the slide
is a picture of Rushing Waters Trout Farm
down in Palmyra, Wisconsin.
It's the largest trout farm in Wisconsin and he uses
flow-through technology to take care of his fish.
You can kind of see the water coming out right there.
He's got aerators in his pond and he's got
a bunch of kids fishing, so it's a really nice location.
The other way that some of the places raise fish
is using ponds which they are treating more like
a seasonal pond so it's filled up maybe with rain water,
maybe some well water.
They're raising fish like yellow perch,
blue gills or walleyes.
And that's how a lot of the walleyes are raised in Wisconsin
for the stocking programs so if you've heard of the
Governor's Walleye Initiative, and these people
raising walleyes to stock more walleyes
so there's more walleyes to catch,
that's how they're raising them is in ponds.
The third one is recirculation and recirculation
is higher technology and it's not new
but it's newer to Wisconsin.
And probably in the last ten or fifteen years
we've been seeing more and more interest in recirculation
and this is where you're reusing a lot of the water.
It's an indoor facility so everything is
inside under a building and
you're limiting predation on the fish,
you're controlling where the fish are at
so there's no chance of escapement or any issues with that.
And you might see fish like arctic char or yellow perch
or tilapia in a recirculation system, among others.
We've even been raising walleyes in our
recirculation system quite successfully.
So recirc is really cool because
you're reusing a lot of that water.
And the last one I just want to point out is aquaponics.
So aquaponics is indoors and it's
mixing the plants and the fish together and you may have
seen this or you may have read about it somewhere.
Aquaponics is really cool and
it's really taking off in a lot of different areas.
You read about it, there's a lot of different things
related to aquaponics going on right now.
And you typically would see fish like yellow perch
or maybe tilapia in an aquaponics setting.
So those four methods kind of outline
what's happening in Wisconsin.
I did want to just point out, though, like any other
type of farming, aquaculture can affect the environment
if it's done improperly.
I would like to say that most of the Wisconsin fish farmers
that we deal with, especially the successful ones,
are really worried about their fish farms
and they're really worried about the water that leaves
their farms that's going into the environment
because they live there and they raise kids there.
Their kids are swimming in the ponds with, not with the fish
but maybe right next to the fish
so they are concerned about that just like we are.
And I honestly can't say I've run into a fish farmer
that has a polluted source
coming out of his facility in Wisconsin.
The other thing is that, just to keep them honest,
Wisconsin fish farms are regulated by both state
and federal agencies so if they don't do this on their own,
they're going to be forced to anyways.
So there's a lot of regulations involved with fish farming.
You have to be certified.
You are inspected and things like that
by different agencies.
An interesting fact is that the U.S. government
cannot regulate the environmental impacts
of international fish farms.
When you look at it that way, well, yeah, of course, right?
The U.S. government can't tell other places how to
deal with their farms, but we're buying fish
from those fish farms so we're sustaining those businesses.
So if you go to WalMart tonight
and you buy tilapia that's 99 cents a pound
that's a product of somewhere else,
good luck with eating that fish tonight. (laughs)
The take home message again is know what you are buying
and know what you're eating because
those fish farms that are located in other areas
potentially may not be regulated like a U.S. fish farm.
I want to thank Kathy Kline from Wisconsin Sea Grant
for a lot of this aquaculture facts and info.
She was very helpful and they have a lot of great stuff
on their web page if you go to Wisconsin Sea Grant
and you can find a lot of helpful information there.
I'm going to switch gears a little bit and
I'd like to talk a little bit more in detail with something
that I actually know quite a bit more about
than world aquaculture.
This is about the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
Northern Aquaculture Demonstration Facility.
That's a long title and so we abbreviate it
UWSP NADF, N-A-D-F
so if you hear somebody talk about NADF or if you hear
me talk about it, that's what I'm talking about.
It's a state of the art facility.
This is a conceptual drawing when it was built
about 12 or 13 years ago and we have
various components onsite to do education and demonstration.
We're located in Red Cliff, Wisconsin, just a short drive
up the shoreline right along beautiful Lake Superior,
which is the greatest of all the Great Lakes.
And we're about one and a half miles past the
Legendary Waters Resort and Casino.
And if you come by, you guys can come
for a tour any time you like.
We're open seven days a week.
So when the facility was constructed
it was to promote and advance the development
of commercial aquaculture in a northern climate.
That was part of the mission, that's not the whole mission.
There's quite a bit more that goes on up there,
but that's one thing that we were very interested in.
In Wisconsin that's really important because
there's over 2,500 registered fish farms.
There's one sitting in the audience, right?
And so to be a fish farm in Wisconsin,
I mean you could just have a pond with some fish in it
but you're supposed to be registered.
Or you could have a whole blown up facility that employs
20 people or 40 people and you're processing fish
and selling fish and so there's a whole wide range.
And a lot of our fish farms are located down here
in the southern part of the state
and near epicenters of people, right?
Because if you're raising fish, you've got to be able
to sell your fish if you're going to make a living.
So Palmyra, as I mentioned, Rushing Waters
is down in this area kind of between Madison and Milwaukee.
There's other fish farms
located all around the state, right?
And we're up here, way up in the north.
We don't have a lot of fish farms by us but I think
they figured that if we could raise fish this far north,
and we could demonstrate technologies,
then we could do it anywhere if we could do it up there.
I guess, that's what I keep telling myself.
Who else has Alice in Dairyland that,
it's Alice in Fishland for us and she
came up to our facility and that's pretty cool.
Even she came all the way up to see us.
What is NADF promoting
or what are we talking about with aquaculture?
What we're trying to do is promote
sustainable land based closed containment
recirculating aquaculture systems.
So, that's kind of a mouthful and what does that mean?
I'm going to talk a little bit more about
recirculating systems but we want to promote
sustainable systems that aren't affecting the environment
in negative ways and that are going to stay in business
for more than one or two years.
This is really important.
We've had a lot of aquaculture opportunities pop up
in Wisconsin and we've had a lot of them
slip through our fingers so we're trying to
build successful businesses that are going to
be in business and stay here and hire people and
provide good quality fish or seafood
locally so that we can eat those.
The other thing that we would like to see is that these
recirculating systems and these closed containment systems
provide separation from wild populations which guarantee
no transmission of disease,
parasites, inbreeding or competition.
So that's a big issue with aquaculture
like the net pen aquaculture.
That's what everybody's afraid of.
So by doing this on land, we can get away from that
and we can control those things
from not causing problems to our wild populations.
The other cool thing is that these systems are promoted
and endorsed by many environmental agencies
including the Conservation Fund, the Fresh Water Institute,
the Atlantic Salmon Federation, Tides Canada, I know there's
others involved too and others that are supporting this.
And I think you'll see more and more
over the next few years.
But to support that mission and to support
kind of what we're promoting, the facility,
which is right here,
houses indoor recirculation systems so like I mentioned
they have, we have these tank systems.
We have outdoor ponds as well to
show people how to raise fish in outdoor ponds
cuz that is very common in Wisconsin.
And we have a bunch of school kids here
that just put up a nice wetlands sign.
We actually created a wetland back here to deal
with our effluent in a natural way.
Recirculating aquaculture, so I'm not going to go into the
three day course on recirculating aquaculture,
it's pretty technical.
There's a lot of cool things like bio filters
and oxygen generators and oxygen injection
and stuff like that involved but basically
it's recirculating water through these tanks
that would hold a variety of fish, maybe fish like these
Atlantic salmon or rainbow trout
or arctic char, things like that.
The water is recirculated around
through some different components like a bio filter
and a drum filter which are removing solids
and removing the ammonia that the fish are excreting
into the water and converting it so that the water
can then be reused by the fish.
They're pretty efficient systems.
We're looking at probably a 95% recirculation rate
of the water so what that means is a facility that typically
would need maybe 1000 gallons of water to operate
can operate on a couple of hundred gallons of water.
It really dramatically decreases
the amount of water that you need.
Flow-through raceways,
I talked about those a little bit earlier.
They're simple systems.
The water goes in, goes through the raceway, the fish use it
and then it leaves the raceway and goes out the door.
They're not very efficient but they're very common
cuz that's what everybody put in years ago.
We have lots of flow-through raceways
located around Wisconsin and elsewhere in a lot
of different hatcheries in a lot of different settings.
We actually have lake trout, brood stock that we hold in
these raceways and what we're trying to do here
is demonstrate a farm tech style building
that protects the raceways and protects the fish
so that they aren't getting any effects from the sun
or any effects from perdation or anything like that.
These brood stock are part of a project that we're doing
with a research scientist out of Washington state
who's with NOAA and he's actually studying the population,
he's looking at the populations of
lake trout in Lake Superior.
We have two different strains,
we have fat trout and lean trout.
The fat trout are just like it sounds,
they need to spend more time on a bicycle or a treadmill.
They're fat. And then there's the lean trout
that are kind of lean and slick and they're up in
the shallower water and those two groups have come together
and there's some issues there and so he's
kind of looking at some of that with some of the
state biologists as well trying to figure out
why are these fish behaving the way they are behaving.
We're helping with that project a little bit.
We also have some outdoor ponds
and like I mentioned, these ponds would be used
to raise fish like yellow perch or walleye.
We have some aeration into the pond.
Right here we have some aerators, we have a feeder,
we've got fresh water coming in and
we would aerate this pond, provide fresh water and feed
to the fish and then at the end of the season
we're harvesting those fish.
So what do we really do?
We talked a little bit about what the facility has,
what kind of systems we have,
but what do we do on a daily basis?
Well, we're conducting applied research to benefit
Wisconsin aquaculture and we also work
with a variety of partners.
We test theories and ideas with new equipment
and supplies to see if it'll work.
So a fish farmer might come to us and say,
"Hey, I've got this idea for a fish feeder, you know,
I want to use a leaf blower and I want to make a fish feeder
and blow feed into my pond and I want to see if it'll work."
Maybe we would test that out for him
to see if it really works or does that blower end up
getting gummed up with fish feed
and stuff like that and won't work.
It actually does work and it's really a fish feeder
that's used around the state, now.
People use leaf blowers and blow feed out into the ponds.
We cooperate with private, state, tribal
and federal partners to conduct projects.
I'm going to talk a little bit more about that.
Partnering up is really important in today's day of age,
not only financially but also it's just the right
thing to do, so we do a lot of work together.
We host and conduct training workshops at the facility
so depending on what's happening,
we may host a workshop on recirculation aquaculture,
we may host a workshop on walleye culture.
We have somebody in the audience who was at that one,
Bob.
(laughs)
We work internationally and give presentations
at conferences all over the country and all over the world.
Some of our research is presented at
international conferences and we share that information
with partners all over the place.
So, what are we doing in the facility?
We've got some different pictures here on the screen.
We're looking at some, looks like a coho salmon
and a brook trout in a cup there and
we've got a young man and a young lady
who are probably interns working on projects
and some yellow perch in some tanks.
Basically we're just showing that we have some
experimental tank design set ups.
We're monitoring the water quality in those tanks
and we have interns that are helping with that
and gaining some valuable experience so that
they can go out into the workforce.
This is a typical graph that might show some of our results.
This is actually looking at
hybrid walleye versus purebred walleye growth and weight.
These lines are showing different weights of
groups of fish as they were raised as we were doing
a project to compare hybrid walleye versus purebred walleye.
This is actually one of our keystone research projects
we've been working on for quite some time
and we're starting to get Wisconsin farmers on board.
We actually have a couple farmers that are doing this now,
that are starting to sell fish to the market and
we're going to be presenting some of this research
at the World Aquaculture Society meeting in February.
Again, I talked about partnerships, partnerships with
private, federal, state, tribal and university entities
around the world encompassing a lot of areas, right?
The facility has been quite successful.
We are booked up right now with research projects
for at least the next couple of years
and we have people calling us all the time asking for more
projects and they want to do this, they want to do that
and I have to tell them we're too busy right now,
we can't do it but we'll put you on the docket
for 2018 or 2020.
Why are we so successful?
I think we found a niche where the recipe for success for us
is these partnerships so we're working
with private aquaculture interests.
This group here,
the Aquaterra is the main name of the company,
they're down in southern Wisconsin and
we've been working with them to look at the feasibility
of raising arctic char as a food fish for Wisconsin.
And it's taken off very well for them.
They've actually built a facility and they are hiring
some of our interns and some of our technicians
to work there and they are raising arctic char
and selling them to the Chicago and Milwaukee markets.
Arctic Charr is a really good fish to eat
if you've never had it.
It's like a sweet salmon. It's really good.
And again, I like to eat fish.
Developing protocols for lake herring production.
That was a collaboration with the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the
Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewas.
We looked at raising lake herring because there's interest
in restoring and stocking those fish to Lake Michigan
and Lake Huron because they've been extirpated.
The Fish and Wildlife Service in particular is
very interested in this and they're actually
building a hatchery to raise lake herring,
but there's a small problem,
they've never raised lake herring.
So they're building this hatchery and they don't know
how to raise lake herring so guess who
they came to to find out about it?
They came and talked to us and said,
"Hey, would you guys be interested in partnering on this?"
because we've raised lake herring before.
So we were able to help them and we actually are
writing a book right now on how to raise lake herring
for the facility that's being constructed right now.
I talked a little bit about this earlier,
this is one of the private Wisconsin farms.
They got a small business innovation research grant
to study hybrid walleye.
A lot of the fish farmers come to us to help partner
for grants and to help partner for research
cuz they just a lot of times just don't have the resources
available so the university's able to really help them
with that and dedicate some resources
to that for research projects.
And this one has turned into a really good one.
It's edible success basically, so what do I mean by that?
Starting with a fingerling hybrid walleye,
this is a native hybrid in Wisconsin, it's called a saugeye
and it's nothing fancy, it happens in the wild,
but they grow quite quickly.
So this hybrid can be grown up to a market size fish in
less than a year and then it results in some
really, really nice Friday night fish fries.
So this farmer has taken this under his wing
and he's moving forward with it.
He's been at it for a couple years now and he's
slowly growing his facility and we hope soon he'll be able
to supply fingerlings to other groups, other private farmers
and that he'll be able to help them as well.
We've helped him all along this process.
Aquaponics, I touched on that.
Aquaponics is a true public-private partnership
that we have going on right now.
Its big driving force is to educate the workforce,
so we've been working with Nelson and Pade.
Nelson and Pade is one of the leading consulting
aquaponics groups in the country and they're based
in Montello, Wisconsin and UW-Stevens Point has been
partnering with them and they've been able to offer
the first university aquaponics course in the state and it's
one of three or four in the nation that's accredited.
The university has an opportunity to teach these kids.
They have an opportunity to go to Nelson and Pade and work
at a real life aquaponics facility and get
some certification which will help them later on in life.
Another really important part of what we do is our outreach.
We do tons and tons of interactive tours.
We do kindergarten through 12th grade,
we do college, universities as well and we
also do lots of other folks in between.
We easily do several hundred visitors every year.
I think the number that's listed here is quite low.
I think we've done quite a bit more than that.
We get people from all over the world that come
to visit our facility, we actually get requests from people.
I have some folks from Ontario that have requested
to come work with us to see how we do the walleye stuff
and so they're requesting to send some techs,
biologists and techs, to work with us.
We also work locally with all of our schools.
Bayfield, Ashland and Washburn all have aquaponics
and aquaculture programs now and these
have been incorporated into their curriculums.
We're actually, you know the kids are now learning this
even as far back as elementary and middle school
and then they're coming to high school, they have a real
aquaponics system to work on and grow
some vegetables and some fish.
And by the time they go to college, if they're interested
in this, they've got a good hands-on working idea
and we're starting to recruit kids from
the high school now that are going to the colleges
and coming out of colleges and we're recruiting them
as technicians and then we're finding them jobs.
We provide a lot of technical assistance and fish for our
various partners and we're on the phone all the time.
We're open 24 hours a day, it seems like
because we're getting phone calls all the time
because the fish don't care that it's Johnny's birthday
or that it's Christmas or whatever.
The fish will just die on you if you don't
take care of them so we have to provide a good
good technical assistance and we have to be able
to respond to calls quickly.
And we try to do that as best we can.
We also give lots and lots of presentations,
just like this one tonight.
We give presentations all over the country
and internationally as well and we go to a lot
of industry conferences and try to share our research.
A lot of our information is available on our web page,
so if there's reports or something that are of interest to
you guys or to somebody that's out there,
they can get those right off of our web page.
I mentioned job placement
and right now it's been huge for us.
Our interns and technicians and even our volunteers
have been getting full-time jobs
out and about at different places.
We just had one that went to Washington state
to work for a company that's raising Atlantic salmon
because we're raising Atlantic salmon
and they're working with us and they liked what's going on
and so they hired one of our technicians.
We also just had a technician that recently went over
to work for the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewas,
this smiling guy up here in the corner.
He was with us for five years, he learned an awful lot
and was a great, a great technician and they got
a really good worker over there now from him.
So we're educating the workforce and we're doing that
with hands-on training, experience and applied research
so that these kids come out of college with a degree,
but they come out of college with hands-on training,
experience and applied research under their belt.
And right now they are in demand.
I can't place them quick enough right now.
I've got people calling looking for more.
We also work pretty closely with our UW-Extension agents.
We actually have a couple that were aquaculture agents
around the state and we've worked with them to help create
some jobs and save some jobs and provide assistance
to a lot of different fish farmers that are out there.
There's a lot of questions and sometimes
it's just a simple question, you know.
Somebody calls up and says,
"Hey, I've got a pond and I want to put fish in it,
what do I need to do?" Other times it's really technical.
It could be, "Hey, I've got a million dollars
and I want to invest in a fish farm, what do I do?"
So helping people get through that,
that's part of what we're there for as well
as trying to weed through some of that stuff.
And if we don't know the answer we'll try to send you
to somebody who does know the answer.
And with that, there's my contact information.
So again, my name is Greg Fischer
and I'm the Facilities Manager
at the Northern Aquaculture Demonstration Facility.
And you can visit our web page
at < www.aquaculture.uwsp.edu >.
Find out all kinds of stuff and come for a visit
whenever you would like.
I'll take any questions at this time.
(applause)