Extension Highlights

Fun and a Future in Fish

Nathan L’Etoile of Four Star Farms and Extension’s Craig Hollingsworth

Aquaculture may not replace the Massachusetts dairy industry any time soon, but Craig Hollingsworth and Nathan L’Etoile find that when it comes to farming, fish are a lot more interesting than cows.

“Basically, fish are a lot of fun,” notes Hollingsworth, who is an Extension entomologist with a long background in integrated pest management. He was last seen on these pages chasing invasive weeds. “Fish are fun to watch, and they’re really very interesting to grow. They aren’t like dairy cows. Cows share the same environment as people – if the air is wrong in the barn, you know it. Fish live in a different world. To keep them healthy, you have to watch many different factors, like oxygen, ammonia, and pH. Their behavior is a clue; you have to watch closely.”

“Fish husbandry is 1000 years behind other kinds of animal husbandry” echoes L’Etoile, who is the youngest son in a Northfield turf farming family. He also serves as communications director for the Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation. “Unlike cows and goats and sheep, we’re still trying to figure out how to breed them and how to interact with them most successfully.”

L’Etoile is doing a good deal of that kind of interacting these days as he tends to some 6000 young largemouth bass at Four Star Farm, a one-time dairy farm on the shores of the Connecticut River in Northfield.

So how do an entomologist and an agro advocate team up to help remake the future of aquaculture in Massachusetts?

Quite successfully, so far, in part because both men have a strong and cooperative personal commitment to making it work, and because they are part of a small community of aquaculturists who tend to exchange expertise and enthusiasm. There are about a dozen commercial finfish producers in Massachusetts, plus state and federal hatcheries, educational groups, hobbyists and sport fishing clubs.

When it came time for L’Etoile to stake out some new directions for his family’s successful 250-acre turf operation, he was interested in an enterprise that would be less susceptible to the ups and downs of the housing market than the turf or nursery business. He also knew that it had to be a self-sustaining addition to the continuing turf operation, with real value-added potential. He paid a visit to UMass Extension where Hollingsworth had recently inherited leadership of the aquaculture program from Keith Wilda, who was shifting his expertise to the private sector (See In Common, Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 2003).

“Craig has been a very good source of support, and he puts a lot of his own energy and expertise into this,” says L’Etoile. “If he doesn’t know the answer to a question, he’ll help find one. He’s very resourceful.”