Pigeon no, fish yes

Ontario farmers who paid big money to buy pigeons are helpless as their only buyer — Pigeon King — collapses in bankruptcy. It is yet another example of a big idea falling flat, and taking down a bunch of earnest farmer investors with it. Pigeon King was going to sell pigeons for food. The French, after all, eat "squab" all the time. So Pigeon King enticed a bunch of farmers to diversity into raising pigeons, buying breeding pairs for some ridiculous price. But the business plan didn't fly. It was a plane without passengers. It didn't have a homing instinct. And now there are 400,000 extra pigeons in Ontario.

I use this sad story about meat pigeons to introduce another "livestock" opportunity that I think really does have potential for Canada. And that is aquaculture. The world really does need more fish farming. Wild stocks are declining, especially for the fish species that people really want to eat. Farming is the only way to keep up with demand. But fish farming in pens in the ocean has lots of critics, and not just David Suzuki. One answer is to move the fish inland and raise them in tank-pens in climate-controlled barns.

This isn't a new idea, of course. It has been tried in Western Canada with tilapia and char and some other fish, and in many cases, it has not been all that successful. I have two questions that I hope to answer over the next few months: One, are there any successful inland fish farms in the world and what makes them successful? And two, how can Western Canadian grain and livestock producers participate more in this business?

Canola Digest earlier this year had an article by Rhea Yates about the Can Pro plant in Arborfield, Sask. It breaks up canola meal to isolate the protein. This could make a very good fish food, a company rep says. So even if we don't raise the fish here, we could grow the food that farmed fish eat.

We're not talking a squab-sized market either. Yates quoted Murray Drew, with the department of animal and poultry science at the University of Saskatchewan, saying, "This year or next year, (fish farming) is going to pass beef production in terms of size. Right now, about one third of the fish in the world are raised in aquaculture. In China, Japan and Norway, it's huge."

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