Fish Are Jumping—Off Assembly Line

For a few weekends this spring, perch-lovers lined up to buy whole fish for $5 each. It takes three or four perch to get a pound of fillet. More fish should be big enough to sell by late summer. Photo by Jon Lowenstein. See more with the article.

Perch, Loved in Milwaukee but Decimated in Lake Michigan, Find New Life in an Old Factory; On the Side: Fresh Produce

By Joe Barrett
Wall Street Journal
May 14, 2010

Excerpt:

MILWAUKEE—Josh Fraundorf remembers when yellow perch were so plentiful in Lake Michigan that people pulled out all they could eat with just a bamboo pole and some worms.

Now, they have to come to places like this old factory south of downtown.

With the lake’s population of wild perch decimated, Mr. Fraundorf is helping the fish make an unlikely comeback, raising about 80,000 yellow perch and tilapia in tanks inside a cavernous former crane factory that sat empty for decades.

That’s not all the factory produces. Stacked over the 10 four-foot deep tanks are hydroponic planting beds lit by lamps. The fish waste produces ammonia that microorganisms convert into food for lettuce and other plants, cleaning the water for the fish.

“It’s like an indoor wetlands,” said Mr. Fraundorf, 35 years old, who co-founded Sweet Water Organics Inc. with James Godsil, his partner in a separate roofing and construction business.

Yellow perch have dark stripes and grow up to 12 inches in the wild. In Milwaukee, the firm, sweet fish is usually served battered and fried with German potato salad, rye bread and beer.

Perch once dominated Friday fish fries, a Midwest tradition especially prominent in this heavily Catholic city. But the perch population in Lake Michigan collapsed in the mid-1990s, partly because of the proliferation of zebra mussels. The voracious mussels, which hitchhiked to the lake in the hulls of ocean-going ships, choked off the food supply for baby perch.

See the rest of the article and more photos here.