From the Fields - Katie Harris

By Katie Harris, Tehama County trout farmer 

We are gearing up for our busy season, which is mid-October through June. In the summer, most of the water in California is too warm to stock trout, so we’ve been trying to grow trout as fast as we can to get ready for the markets to start opening.

I’m getting all our contracts in place and all our stocking schedules put together for our Northern California deliveries. Most of our fish end up in Southern California. We are feeding fish to try to get them to market size as we get closer to the kickoff of trout season. When things cool off, we are in Southern California twice a week, all winter long, starting about Nov. 1 and going through mid-April. Then we’ve got a lot of springtime customers in Northern California that have fishing derbies once a year, so we don’t start slowing down until the middle of June.

All our farms are spring fed. We don’t pump any water, and we don’t pull any out of the water table with a well. In low precipitation years, those springs don’t produce as much water, so we can’t raise as many fish. The last few years, the springs have been pretty darn good. So far, we haven’t been too constrained. We’ve got the water, but we don’t necessarily have enough oxygen to support all the fish. One big new addition to our company has been the introduction of liquid oxygen into one of our facilities, and we’re expanding that into another.

There definitely is more demand than supply in the recreational fishing market, which is a good thing for us. We’re not taking on any new customers because we simply don’t have the fish to meet the demand, which means prices will go up. We’ve only got so many fish, and we need to get them to market size. That’s what we’re trying to do, is push them to get to that top market size.