We're very excited to be kicking off 2023 with Arlen Taylor of Springhills Fish! Arlen came back to the family fish farm in southwestern Ontario after working in the international development world. During the pandemic they started processing and selling their own fish, including Rainbow Trout, Salmon, and Arctic Char. They can be found at www.springhillsfish.ca, and as @SpringhillsFish on Facebook and Instagram.

Thank you for joining us today on Barnyard Language. If you enjoy the show, we encourage you to support us by becoming a patron. Go to Patreon to make a small monthly donation to help cover the cost of making a show. Please rate and review the podcast and follow the show so you never miss an episode.

 You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as BarnyardLanguage, and on Twitter we are BarnyardPod. If you'd like to connect with other farming families, you can join our private Barnyard Language Facebook group. We're always in search of future guests for the podcast. If you or someone you know would like to chat with us, get in touch.

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Welcome to another episode of Barnyard Language.

Happy New Year.

Thank you for coming back and joining us in 2023.

So we've got many weeks of updates to catch up on.

Katie, what is the report?

Did Christmas happen?

Christmas did happen.

And we we have not put any hay up.

Arlene.

I feel like there was a long part of last year where just every

week my update was we made hay.

, no hay has been

made since last night in December or

January.

Zero.

Zero hay.

Quite a bit of hay has been fed.

Got it.

No hay has been produced.

The cows all weathered that last Jet stream, bomb cyclone, tornado

blizzard, whatever the hell that was.

Super cold and gross.

Yeah.

It was like negative 50 wind chills and yeah.

Destruction.

Destruction.

Horribleness.

I bet

your new roof on the barn held up though.

It

did.

It did.

Which is good because if we paid that much money and it didn't,

I would I would be very sad.

Yeah, that would be problematic.

. Yeah.

The sheep are getting fat will start lambing first week of March.

So it's on the big calendar in the kitchen.

Do the sheep know about the calendar?

No, but I like to take it out and show it to 'em so that they

know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not before inappropriate.

Not too much after.

Not

before, not after.

Please mark it on the calendar if you anticipate needing help.

Yeah.

You.

. Yeah.

Let me mark all the holidays in so you know, when we should need to

call the vet and, cause I don't know about anybody else, but it is not a

holiday weekend if the vet's not here.

Yeah, for sure.

It's just not the same without Dr.

Amanda

just prepare a little bit of extra food, right?

Yeah.

She's one of the family other than, Not much is going on.

I thought the kids were going back to school today, but

apparently it's tomorrow.

So that was a little embarrassing, but thankfully daycare was

prepared for that eventuality.

just on, and we were not the only family who thought the school was.

Okay, good.

Good.

Starting today.

Yeah.

It was a little confusing break was over yesterday, but

today was a teacher in service.

Yeah, they're back to school, but they're not actually.

But

you can't actually go to school.

Yeah.

Got it.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what is the Christmas report though?

Was it as exciting as they thought it was going to be?

I know the they were spending a lot of time talking about it in advance.

My son recognized the bailer.

The box that the toy bailer he wanted was in, despite the fact

that it was wrapped and upside down.

He said, oh look, I got my Baylor . And that's how, if you spent too much

time at the farm store looking at

this toy.

Yeah.

Just dimensions

alone.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Christmas was really good until the morning of the 26th when they came

down and said, where are our presents?

Oh, and.

every day since then when they've asked when Christmas is because,

so we're just going to talk about Christmas from now until next

year.

No, the boy child has also asked when we anticipate that we might die.

Oh, that's something to look forward to too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's something.

Yeah.

Oh, and the girl child sprained her ankle.

New Year's Eve, jumping out of a friend's bunk bed.

So we got to spend the morning hours of New Year's Day enjoying our newly

rolled over, out of pocket max on our insurance by spending the morning at the

emergency room, making sure it was not broken, which it wasn't perfect, thank

God.

But yeah, start the year off right?

Yeah.

It's also not a holiday if you're not in the emergency room.

That's.

Yeah.

Emergency room or emergency vet call, like the only, only

two ways to start a holiday.

How are things up in your world, Arlene?

They're good.

Yeah.

Christmas was, The actual Christmas Eve, Christmas day, were pretty quiet.

We got a delightful ice, rain, snow, super high wind storm

through those couple of days.

So it actually worked out well because we had planned to celebrate Christmas

with my husband's side of the family three or four days before Christmas,

and my one sister didn't come home.

Southwestern Ontario or not home here she, her home is in Southwestern

Ontario, so she was not traveling until between Christmas and New Year's.

So Christmas Day was actually pretty quiet.

It was just us and my in-laws and my one sister-in-law.

after chores.

Yeah, it was, it worked out nicely that Christmas was quiet, that we

didn't have to cancel any plans because we weren't gonna go anywhere.

Church actually got canceled on Christmas Eve because the storm was so bad.

So we were in our pajamas watching the Grinch instead of being in church

on Christmas Eve, which was fine.

It was cozy and yeah, we didn't actually have to call the vet on Christmas so that.

And my parents were able to get to our place.

They usually come for brunch on Christmas Day, so we did still get to

see them, which is our usual tradition.

So that was nice.

And then, like I said, my one sister was coming to this end of the

province, so we did a couple of days with them and lots of cousin time.

We had a daytime celebration of New Year's Eve and we were

back home well before midnight.

We're in that place though, where we've got kids who want to stay up

till midnight but their parents are old enough that they don't really want

to stay up until midnight Compromised and I stayed up and my husband went

to bed, which is the usual compromise when it comes to staying up late.

Did you see midnight?

Oh

no.

We have a tradition with some friends whose their oldest little boy is

two weeks older than the girl child.

Where for the last quite a few years now, we get together for what

we call noon year's eve, or noon year's day, depending on the day.

Perfect.

And we have a big fancy lunch.

And then we can all go to bed at eight o'clock and it's amazing.

That is delightful.

And they have a six week old baby, so I got to snuggle the baby and eat good food.

and go to bed.

Probably about the same time that they're six week old baby did.

And it was amazing.

Perfect.

So

hopefully you slept

through the night.

No, I haven't slept through the night in since before I got

pregnant with the first kid.

Okay.

If that's not part of your routine, then that's okay.

No,

no.

No, but it was delightful and it's that's good.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think I've got much to report on the farm side of.

It's the usual.

Cows are getting milked, cows are having calves.

Yeah, the usual stuff in the barn.

Everything seems to be working.

We have gone, maybe you two have gone into this weird thaw where

it's like way warmer than usual.

So I'm sure that means that it's gonna get super cold again soon.

So that's usually a case for people, not people, animals,

to start getting pneumonia.

So I'm not.

if that's gonna happen or not, but that's not ideal.

If it could just be like a consistent temperature, that would be nice.

But I guess that's not the way it's gonna be.

And our kids don't go back to school.

Oh, sorry Katie.

Our kids don't go back to school for a few more days.

So we're still chilling at home.

We're we're getting the same thing with that thaw and.

. I know you live on a gravel road too.

I assume that your roads are as big of a sh show as ours are

with ours is that in between it's like a packed tar type

thing, but yeah, it's not good.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

We're at that place where it's, half an inch of mud on top of four inches of ice.

Oh, nice.

And then with some fresh ice on top of the mud . So that's always real fun, yeah.

Our yard's the same way, so walking across the yard is a little slippery right now.

Lots of wet, muddy dogs too.

Yeah.

Yes, very much yeah.

And

wet, muddy kids.

Very much.

That

too.

Yeah.

So why don't we go ahead and introduce our guest for this week.

This is an episode that we've recorded a while ago because we've

gotten so many amazing guests lately, but we're really excited

for you guys to listen to this one.

So today we're talking to Arlan Taylor, who is a fish farmer as part of a

family run fish farm here in Ontario.

And we start each of our interviews with the same questions.

This is a way to introduce yourself to our listeners.

We ask, what are you growing?

And this can cover crops and livestock for farmers and families and businesses

in all manner of other things.

So Arlan, what are you growing?

We so we are SpringHill fish and cedar crust trout farms simultaneously.

We do a little bit of everything in the fish industry.

So our primary business for the last 25 years has been rainbow trouts and namely

rainbow trout fingerlings, which are four to six inch fish that then get shipped

out to other farms, be them land-based or big net pen farms around Georgian Bay.

More recently we have started also now raising.

Cohost Salmon and our chart.

We also have the longest running breeding program.

Ontario for sure.

For Rainbow Trout, we have our breeders dated back to 1953.

So we also breed between 10 and 12 million eggs a year, and we supply those to not

only ourselves and our own farms, but also to other farmers across Canada.

And then in Covid times we started growing fish for meat.

So now we run a direct to consumer brand and we have our own processing plant and

we deliver to 15 to 1800 homes a month.

So that's been a completely new thing for us.

And then we started a partnership with some First Nations groups up north and

we've gotten into net pen farming now for bigger meat production just because we

are basically timed out on our farms down here in the south, in southern Ontario.

So it's Yeah, we do a lot of different stuff and I have a

numerous dogs that you'll hear barking throughout this podcast.

That is a lot of different things.

And are you also growing a family?

I hear that you're

a parent too.

I am, yeah.

I have one son.

He is seven, soon to be eight.

My husband also works with us here on the farms not really

by choice more by circumstance, by way of getting me pregnant.

But anyways so yes we have that.

And then all my adopted teenagers, we run a pretty big co-op program.

And I have, I don't know, currently I have four teenagers that work with us

on the farms, and that's our way of having more children because my body is

broken, so I steal other people's delin.

She's

definitely one of us.

Arlene . So Arlene, my first question, I'm gonna go ahead

and skip what Arlene has here.

What is it like to have livestock that can't run away?

They can swim away.

And the, a large part of our job is to ensure that never happens.

So are they not in tanks then, or where they are in tanks?

So we have tanks, but all of our firms are a little bit different.

On the six different facilities that we have one specifically

that is a riverrun facility.

So basically what that means is, The river is diverted through the farm,

not the river in its entirety, but a percentage of the river, about 25% of

the water flow, and it comes through the farm and returns back to the river.

And at that particular facility it's not so much that the Rainbow Trout wants to

get out of the facility, but it's that the wild fish wants to come into the facility

because it's getting into the Mandarin.

So they we have a big exclusion process there.

And then obviously with the net pen farm up north it's ensuring

that the fish cannot get out of the nets for whatever reason.

Holes can happen, predators like to chew them, things like that.

So that's a big part of our job.

When you say they can't run away, if you're in a tank with them, they can

swim at you with all of their force as a group, which can knock you.

That's terrifying, like picture cattle and I'm way more freaked out by

the idea of a bunch of fish attacking.

We, with some of our industry partners who have tilapia, we actually

have to wear hockey helmets to get in the tanks because the fish's

defense mechanism is to jump out of the water and shuck you in the head.

So yeah, fish can be pretty brutal.

Wow.

I'm picturing those fish and finding Nemo where they're all

working together to open up the net.

But

that is absolutely a thing.

That is absolutely a thing.

And depending on, yeah, depending on the species the salmon are much

more prone to the group think being.

One guy makes up his mind and everybody follows suit.

Rainbow Trout are a little more, sol a little, have a little more solidarity.

They they will get along and work together but they will also

just be jerks and work alone.

And Arctic Char are just here for a good time.

They're just, they're like the golden retrievers of fish.

They're pretty predictable.

So we need like a fish personality test.

What fish are you?

That would be good.

Exactly.

We actually have some people like named things after different fish

based on their personalities.

Some people we don't like, we call them rock bass, they're

annoying and they're always Wow.

On the end of the hook.

Yeah.

I think I'm probably a flounder, both eyes on one side,

laying around and looking confused.

So how did your fam, how did your family get started in the business of Fish farm?

It's, huh It's all my dad's fault.

It's all my dad's fault.

So he and a bunch of buddies, he was working for a feed company which is

no longer around Martin Feed Mills.

He was working for them in the sixties and I don't know, they all got drunk

one night and decided they wanted to start making fish food, but to make fish

food, you need to know how to feed fish.

So him and four or five other guys built a fish farm, which is now the

Ontario Aquaculture Research Station.

But they had a bunch of ponds and they had some tanks and they were

figuring out how to raise fish.

And at the same time, they were figuring out how to formulate

the feed to feed the fish.

1969, dad starts that works with that facility until they sold it in 1988.

And his dream was to always have his own farm.

So where I currently reside in Allen Park he bought the property in 1986.

It used to be a fly fishing club.

And he wanted to build a farm.

It took him and my mom nine strenuous years of trying to convince the powers

that be through regulation bodies that the farm could be put here and how

to build it, and so on and so forth.

And so he opened this facility in 1995.

We have had great times and we've had some shitty times like every other farmer.

And then like many other forms of farming, the old boys the sort of

likeness to the old a hundred acre farm.

The same phenomenon has happened in fish farms.

The standalone farm just can't make ends meet for a family anymore.

So old boys that have long, long since paid off their assets started

retiring and new people were not coming in the business, so other

farms started purchasing other farms.

So in 2011, my dad purchased two facilities and I came on board

in 2013 and we purchased another facility in 20 14 15 over the winter.

And then my brother came on board in 2017.

We purchased another farm in together in 2018.

And it's just been like a growing the business that way.

New permits has been impossible.

So we buy old grandfathered permits and we renovate the facilities to

bring them into a more modern approach.

So all of that is to say my dad got into it because it was different.

He did not wanna work with cattle.

He had worked with a lot of cattle.

You have to be batshit crazy to be a fish farmer.

To be any kind of farmer, but really to be a fish farmer because it's water

and it can comes with its own problems.

And he loved the math.

He loved the innovation.

He loved being a pioneer.

So that was what attracted him to this business.

And then for.

Myself and my brother, we were never raised that we were

supposed to take this over.

Thankfully we never thought we would do it.

It was actually the furthest thing from either of our minds.

We both took off at 18 and said fuck this.

Here we go.

Let's do something different.

And both of us, my brothers a couple years younger than me had 10

years off the farm, we'll call it.

Doing my rate of other things.

And then we came back around.

My dad called me, I was working overseas, and he said, I need your help.

My dad is a very proud man and had never asked for my help.

We would butt heads all the time and I said, okay, I'll come back and help.

And I did and I got pregnant and the rest is history.

So that kind of sewed it up for me and then subsequently my brother,

because I roped him into it too.

So for the reasons why I'm in fish farming is because it's an amazing way to.

Work with incredible people in a really cool industry.

And raised my family in a not war zone.

Yeah.

What was that transition like going back, coming back and working

with your, with both your parents?

Is your mom active on the farm as

well?

My mom was active.

Yeah.

So my mom was just coming back into it herself.

So she and I took over all the bookkeeping and took over everything.

It would held and done externally.

My dad had been very much left to his own devices for a few years.

Part of the reason why I never really envisioned this as part of my future

was because at the time it was only one standalone facility, which was a

lot of like daily grind, which I don't mind the daily grind, but it just, I

couldn't see beyond what my dad had done or was doing on a daily basis with

adding, at the time, two more facilities.

It was a lot more interesting.

The transition piece there.

Basically I made a deal with my dad.

If I'm coming home, I'm going to run it.

You have to step down because my dad is, and I are both bullheaded assholes.

And whenever I was between contracts and I was home for a while, of course I'd

help him out and we'd get in a fight.

Cause I'd be like, Hey, what if we do something new?

That's not how we do it.

And so that was a constant theme and a constant burden point.

So the transition was he needed to step down.

And so that I could step up.

And we have and had at the staff at the time, incredible staff that convinced

me to do it and supported me to do it.

And they.

To this day, I am very grateful that they said it's this way or no way.

And my unwavering sense of responsibility kicked in at that point.

The transition was not that hard.

I lived a transitional life, so it wasn't, it was just a new thing.

I think the hardest transition was the baby in the middle of all of that.

Arlen I have to say I really appreciate your self-awareness and

transparency, talking about the difficulties of working with family,

there's certainly a lot of ag folks out there who are like, everything has, oh,

it's been great for six generations.

Everyone has always gotten along perfectly.

And I'm like, no, that's bullshit.

You core Valium in your well, or are you lying?

Cause there's no way, like statistically, no matter how well you

get along, there's gonna be problems.

Yeah.

So I know you were talking about your brother and I have to know,

because we've been communicating on social media, which one of you is

responsible for the god awful puns?

That's totally Oh.

Which, I'm super impressed.

100% him.

So the beautiful Mary, so bad of the two of us is that RJ is a

PR genius and has a lot of fun.

And that is all him.

I am the eyerolling.

I think it's next to dad jokes in the background going, oh fuck me.

Why do you, oh, they're

totally close to dad jokes and I'm here for it.

Oh.

Yep.

Yep.

And he of course now like people give him new ones and so he,

yeah, no, he's just all over it.

So that is 100% rj.

All the social media presence that you see there is down to him.

And more recently we hi, have a new hire that is also helping him

on that front, but that is all rj.

And I it's obviously effective because it's stuck

in my head enough to Oh yes.

Hang on

to it and come ask you about it.

Exactly.

Now RJ is the beautiful, one of the two of us.

He's the face we throw out in the public.

I'm the grinder in the background getting all the work done, and I

let him take all the credit for it.

That's worth a lot though.

Yeah.

So what can you tell us about how your operation runs?

And the one thing I really wanted to ask is how Phish are slaughtered?

Okay.

It's not, yep.

I don't go fishing.

I don't eat fish, to be perfectly honest.

I

Have to get in.

Iowa's not a thing.

We can change we can change your mind about that.

So when we raise fish, it's a very complex job.

There's many parts to it.

I alluded to you earlier about our breeders that we have.

We have nine different strains that we cross breed for different reasons.

And we start them from there.

Those breeders when they begin breeding are three years old.

And we breed them four times until they're six years old.

And then we retire them.

We have the eggs.

So we incubate the eggs for a period of 28 days to eye up, which is during those

first 28 days, we are very tenderly taking care of them, just like they would be

in an incubator on say a chicken barn.

And we don't really touch them.

It's a very much a hands-off experience.

Once they eye up that's the 28 day mark in our current water temperature regime.

Then we can start handling them again.

And then we hatch them out around day 42.

They hatch out.

They are not born with the ability to swim right from the beginning.

So we need to keep them in a nice cool, dark place so that they

can absorb their food supply.

They're born with their own initial food supply in the land of

Selmas anyways, which is what we.

Day 57, we take them out of the incubators where they've been resting

and we start getting them to swim.

We teach them to swim up.

So when they're born, they do not have any air in their swim

bladders, which is what regulates their position in the water column.

So they swim as hard as they can to the surface of the water, take

a big old gulp of air and they fill their swim bladder, and that's

where they can start maintaining their position so they can swim.

And then we get them on feet and we raise them up.

Depending on the water temperature on any given facility.

I should add, my five land-based facilities all work as one big organism.

They might switch facilities while they're eggs.

They might fit switch facilities while their swim ups are fry or fingerlings

and they're constantly moving around.

From the beginning, excuse me, from the beginning it's to get

them swam up and good to go.

By that time they're about three months of age.

So we're caring for them on a daily basis.

We're cleaning their tanks.

We're feeding them up to 20 times a day.

We're making sure their fish health is good, making sure

the strain crosses are good.

Doing a whole ton of monitoring.

And then we'll move them into different facilities either within our group

or we'll sell them outside when they're, let's say four to six inches.

And then they're if they're staying with us to grow on as meat fish, they'll be

with us for another additional two years.

And if they're going to a client, obviously they're getting shipped

on a truck and out the door they go.

So there is daily hourly care involved there.

It's very complex watching the systems.

All of our systems are very d.

So if there's pumping systems or aeration systems or any Myra in between.

So yeah, we have a incredible staff of 25 amongst the farms

and the processing plant.

So if they're staying with us for meat animals we'll raise

them up depending on the species.

The arctic char for example, will start harvesting at two pounds.

The rainbow trout will start harvesting at three pounds and the salmon will start

harvesting between six and seven pounds.

All of that weight is about the same time period.

It's about two and a half years on the facilities.

And then their are live hauled to our processing plant.

So we load them up in trucks that are full of water and oxygen and

aeration and when we take them directly to our processing plant.

You mentioned about slaughter.

There are very few places Currently in Ontario that practice humane slaughter

because fish farms and the fishery are governed by the same laws the

practice which wild fish catch does.

And the harvest for a farm have been very similar, which is an ice Larry Slaughter.

So you're putting fish into ice water and slaughtering them.

That is not what we practice.

What we practice is a percussive stem to the head used with a Zephyr,

if you're familiar with zephyrs and chicken barns, for example.

Which causes immediate loss of sensibility.

So it basically fractures their brain.

And then we do a gill cut which is basically the jug dealer of the fish.

And so that fish then goes into the ice water bath for 20

minutes and it will bleed out.

So we are.

From the time the fish are out of, they're only out of water for between 15 and

30 seconds before they're slaughtered.

That's part of our claim to fame, so to speak.

And then they're processed immediately.

From the time the fish come off the truck, until they're in

the freezer is about two hours.

Can

you describe to me the kind of the physical spaces you're working in?

We're both in Ontario, so I know that it's cold a lot of the year.

How much of your facilities are indoors?

How much is outdoors?

I'm having a hard time

picking.

Yeah, so it's it's a hybridized.

So when fish are small eggs or let's say anything under two

inches, they're always inside.

So we have of think of big barns except for their big

tarp structures like coveralls.

Whereby our interior spaces are some of them are in buildings

fully enclosed heated buildings.

Some are in coveralls and they're in small tanks.

So the smaller the fish, the smaller the tank.

And as they get bigger, so do their tanks and the bigger tanks are outside.

My facilities overall, I have two big, what we call the kingpin facilities.

These are the two larger producing facilities.

And they are 30% indoors and 70% outdoors.

So yes, we work whether it's minus 20 or plus 30, we are inside and outside.

If you get the inside job, sometimes you're happy and sometimes you're

not depending on the weather.

Yeah, that's right.

So in the wintertime is just.

Keating, the tanks and the fat that the fish are moving around.

Is that enough to

keep things from, so it depends on the fac.

Yeah, so it depends on the facility.

So everything comes down to water.

. So not all of our facilities.

All of our facilities have different water sources.

So some of them are spring-fed.

We have these gorgeous aqueducts in the area.

That free flow, about 1500 gallons of water a minute that is consistently nine

degrees, that water will never freeze.

The water coming into a facility if it's a flow-through facility, which

three out of ours are then it comes into the system and flows right

out within 20 minutes so it doesn't ice up at that particular facility.

I have two that run on beautiful springs like that, so they never freeze over.

Our hardest farm is our cedar cross home farm where I live.

And it ices over completely like a river.

The fish stay somewhat active.

They're.

Bodily functions are controlled by their temperature.

They do not regulate themselves like a terrestrial animal would.

So they slow down quite a bit.

Our water temperature here drops down to about point 0.8 degrees Celsius.

So just like a river, it ices over the top 10, 12, sometimes 16 inches,

and the rest flows underneath.

So we keep certain spots open for them through aeration so that they can

come up and feed and so that they can exchange gases in their swim bladders.

But aside from that, they're under the ice.

They're hanging out.

They don't mind, they're used to it.

So they we just have to make sure the ice doesn't get too thick.

So they have, they maintain adequate space for themselves.

And so there's only one facility that ices up.

The others do not, with the exception of the Manitou Island facility,

which is a whole other ice story.

That causes me great grief, but I'm still suffering ptsd.

T s D from , nothing like standing out in the middle of a lake with

a hockey stick and a hundred kilometer sheet of ice, wondering

what the fuck you're gonna do today.

Oh my goodness.

Great.

Canadian . Yeah.

Very Canadian.

So I'm ing they would grow slower and eat less than when

things are colder in the winter.

Yeah.

So they're growing.

So part of those

times, part of our whole strategy on using Cedar crust or Allen Park

facility for a breeding system is so that we can mimic what fish face in Ontario.

So fish in the lakes, fish on other farms, face ice.

In the summer they also face crazy high water temperatures

up to 27, 28 degrees Celsius.

So our breeders over the period of the last, 27 years that we've

been at this facility have been.

Exposed to these highs and lows constantly.

So that we are genetically breeding in a tolerance for climate change and

everything else that we're dealing with.

So yeah, they get for the first two years of their life, they're forced

to deal with those temperatures and those conditions so that we can better

prepare the fish so that they will be able to, their offspring will be able

to handle those same circumstances.

For our,

Tric listeners 28 degrees Celsius is 82 degrees

Fahrenheit, which is yes damn hot.

For most fish, I would

think it is very hot.

It used to be thought the lethal temperature for rainbow trout

was 26.2 or 78 degrees Celsius.

We have proven that wrong through genetic variants over the past two decades.

So when you're talking about smaller tanks and bigger tanks,

what kind of volume are you talking?

So we talk about, I know for myself three goldfish, five

gallons, , 15 liters or something.

I'm guessing that's not what you

mean.

No.

So we we work with total tank volumes and we work again in metric,

unfortunately based on lit in a tank.

And how many kilos per cubic meter of water we can put in.

So our tanks they vary.

Our smallest tanks would be I'm trying to think their 0.6 of a cubic meters.

So 600 liter tanks.

So if I take that back to MedTech, it's 158.

Exactly.

US

gallons.

I've got Google

pulled up as, there you go.

Normally do a Canadian translator.

Hundred and 50 gallons would be our smallest tanks.

And our biggest tanks gosh, they're 10,000 cubic meters.

So I'm not sure how that breaks down.

So a hundred thousand liters.

But I'm sure your Google there can

help you with that.

26,400 and

s.

There you go.

So those are our biggest rearing units.

Basically the way that we calculate it is how many kilos of fish we

can put in a cubic meter of water.

We have very strict welfare rules amongst our company that govern

how many we can raise there.

And the smaller the fish, the less the less weight per cubic

meter, and the bigger the fish, the more weight per cubic meter.

So it ranges.

Our lowest tanks will be about 10 kilos per cub.

And our highest tanks on the land-based side will run between 80 and 90.

With the exception of Arctic char that like to be raised at about 120.

That's their own social networking that they need.

And then when we talk about those same densities do not apply when we

deal with net pen farms, we never, ever get higher than 18 kilos per cub.

So then two more questions.

What do you do with that much dirty fish?

Shit water.

So if,

cause that's a lot, as somebody who's cleaned a few small tanks.

Yeah.

That's a lot of fish shit.

Water.

It is a lot of fish at water, but it's also not a lot of fish at water.

So when you break down fish shit, it's actually 85% water.

So it's only 15 15% hard organic matter.

We have holding facilities, so we clean those tanks every day and we take

all of that manure out and we decant off the water over a series of years.

Because you don't just pull the water out unless you're willing to spend exorbitant

amounts of money, which we are not.

So we naturally decant out all of the water.

And then we clean up our manure lagoons like anyone has on any farm.

We clean those manure lagoons up depending on the facility.

At between our smallest holding facility we have to clean out every three years.

And we have one that we clean out every 30 years.

So because of the way that land-based fish farms are regulat

we cannot take that manure offsite.

So every one of our facilities has a manure spreading field where once we've

done this decanting and we're doing the final cleanup, same equipment you guys

use with the big old honey wagons we pull 'em out and we spread 'em over the fields.

In the case of our Allen Park facility, my father to this day raises the hugest

concoction of squash and pumpkins.

I like acres of squash and pumpkins.

I don't fucking know why.

Just cause he likes to give something for me to do cuz I'm not busy enough

and he's 80, so we have to do it.

But anyways, he we raise it there.

So it's a really fast nitrogen response on fish manure and it's

virtually gone within like two weeks.

So then what do the fish eat?

And.

I'm guessing the fish manure does not smell nearly as bad as the fish

emulsion fertilizer that I'm using on my plants, because I think that's made

from actual fish, right?

It's, yeah.

Yeah.

So for your plants, it's made from ground up fish.

I made the mistake of watering all the plants in the

house with fishy emulsion once.

. And between the smeller and how happy the cats were, it was

not something I'll do again.

. It was . It smells like rotting fish.

Happy.

It is

rot, rotting

fish.

Yeah.

It plants.

For real happy cats, were real happy.

People were not real happy.

. Arlen: That does not surprise me.

So all of our feed is commercially produced.

We work with two companies, one here in Ontario.

That's a new fledgling coming along.

And then a much larger company out of the East coast.

The reality of fish specifically the fish we raise and most fish that

humans like to eat in the western world anyways are top level predators.

So salmon, for example, tuna rainbow trouts.

We eat the fish that like to eat all the fish to get as big as they get.

We have done a lot of work in the last 50 years on how much

fish we need to have in their.

if they had it their way, they would be about 95% fish would be their normal diet.

In this case, we've brought that down to about 40% is still other fish.

So it's it's like a makeup of where we try to aim with our products is

that we use fish from other processes.

So for example, herring if it's cut for human consumption, we

take all the off bits and that's what gets put into fish food.

So they eat a lot of it.

But the great thing about fish is they convert at one to one.

So that part's really neat based on all the work that we've done on our diet.

So it's part of the sustainability that we feel really good about is the fact

that if we put one pound of food in into a tank, we know that we're getting

one pound of fish out of that tank.

Or 50,000 pounds give you 50,000 pounds of fish.

So it's a pretty cool process.

So it's a very specially formulated diet.

Specifically for each species has its own specific food.

Different species have different requirements.

Charred do not like a lot of fat where the salmon want all the fat you can give them.

And the rainbow trout or kind of in between.

So

if you've gotten it down to about 40% fish, what is the rest made up of?

There's, it

varies, but it varies a lot.

So there's a ton of antioxidant pots and packs and vitamins that we mix in there.

Corn, gluten meal soy meal.

Done a lot of work with both of those over the years.

Some of our feeds have insect meal bringing down that amount of fish that.

Evolving science, we'll call it.

We're not quite there yet.

We have to be very cognizant of all of the feed that we use, the amount

of phosphorous that's in the feed.

It's a big concern in the fish industry.

So we're very cognizant of that.

There is some poultry byproduct meal put in there as well to balance out proteins.

Some feather meal some bone meal.

There's a little bit of everything.

It's been a tweak fest in different companies and different diets

are different amounts therein.

And then there's the fish meal.

And the fish oil.

Fish oil being a really key component of that.

That 40%.

So what is the the.

hanging percentage on a fish.

Then, if you have a an eight pound fish, how much of that

ends up on somebody's plate?

I was just picturing like a whole shitload of fish, hung up like the

cattle and I just got distracted by

that.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

So there's many different cuts, obviously when it comes to fish, just

like there is with any other animal.

If we're talking about a hog fish, which is a head-on gutted fish

then the yield is about 86 to 88%.

If it's head off and it's fill, its, they're VCU or they're de-boned

and their entirety, the yield there can range anywhere from 46

to 54% is the total meat value.

But then can that fish scrap, go back into fish feed for more fishes?

It can for other species.

So there's very strict ethical laws about feeding the same fish to the same fish.

It it's an ethical morality question.

Also comes with obviously some biosecurity issues if we do it.

Right now what we do with a lot of our waste actually is we turn into your

fish emulsion as you've experienced

Yeah.

Especially as you guys know, with the fertilizer prices going the way they

are and some of the crazy controls that are being put on people are looking

for more natural options that they can continue to use that are cost effective.

So that's a big part of what we do.

We also feed another industry that takes a lot of heat.

The fur industry.

So a lot of the awful will go into the fur industry.

Interesting.

. Yeah,

yeah, it's, we often don't think of, as people who produce a,

beef or animals, there's lots of talk about the ways that, that, beef is in

lots of different things or like bones and skin and all that kind of stuff,

but we don't often think about Yeah.

The other byproducts of, yeah.

So there, there's many different ways than there's people in the world that

are definitely leading the charge on this.

There's a large part in Europe, a large part of the awful goes into cosmetics.

That's not something that we're exploring very much here in Canada yet.

Just because there's this huge vortex when it comes to fertilizers, fish meal,

and fertilizers, fish meal, and now, or has always been the fur bearing.

So you talked a little bit before about the changes in your

business that occurred around the time of the lockdowns in 2020.

Yep.

Can you talk a bit about how your business pivoted and what led to

that and how you, you were able to capitalize and actually expand at that

time?

Yeah.

So even before COVID was on the horizon we had already, as

we mentioned, there's a lot of consolidation in our industry as well.

So we were already looking at how we could diversify our business a little

bit better, just because we were becoming very dependent on, one or two other

entities, which is very scary for.

We had bought this facility.

We bought two facilities.

The one that we purchased in 2014 15 is our namesake SpringHill facility.

It had a very small processing plant on it.

But we had, when I came into the industry, we were doing all kinds of stuff.

We were paw stocking over here.

We were meat producing over here.

We We're fingerling producing over here.

We're just, and no, we didn't really have a plan.

It was all a big jumble.

So when I came in, we consolidated and we really honed in on fingerling

production so that we could build some capital to actually like, Do

the renovations, do the things that needed to happen on these facilities.

And that game treated us really well for about five years.

And then everything just people start getting a little edgy and there

were, less options and margins were crunching and all the things that

happened in everyone's business models.

And so we were already looking at that.

And we were trying to figure out a way to have more fun.

Again.

We had stopped having fun, as much fun and we have three rules to our business.

And one of them is to have fun.

And so we were trying to find an option for that.

So we had bought this facility that had this really small processing plant on it.

They had been smoking some fish, they'd been, supplying fish to

some small restaurants and they were just doing fresh stuff.

And it was this one incredible woman who can literally just, cut fish

all by hands with her eyes closed.

And she was just like doing her thing.

But it was detracting from what we needed to do as a company.

So we shut it down.

The other facility that we bought in 2018 had a huge processing plant on it.

But it had opted to huge by comparison, sorry, huge by comparison.

First processing plant is like a 10 by 20 building.

This one by comparison was like 20 times the size, so huge to us.

We were not processors, we're farmers.

We didn't have a sweet fucking clue.

So we wanted the farm, not the processing plant.

So we just kept the processing plant shut down and had been shut down

by the previous owners in 2011.

So we kept a shut down.

So we, in part of our diversification strategy, had already started

producing fish for Quebec.

Larger fish in the one to two and a half pound range.

Some of these were going as meat market fish, but a lot of them were

getting stocked into private lakes for fishing lodges in the sort.

So all the tenders in March of.

2020 opened up on March the first, and the lockdown started and

all those tenders disappeared.

So a large hunk of our diversification strategy literally went out the door.

As you guys know, raising livestock animals never stopped growing . So

they were gonna push out the space.

So we sat down with counsel, which is what we call our group of site managers.

And we said what the hell are we gonna do?

And we said we've got this small processing plant.

We've been hawking some B grades for some other industry partners.

For a while we had these little pop-up shops we would

do occasionally in the area.

So we started drinking a bunch of beer, started up the barbecue and sharpened

the knives, and we just started hand cutting and freezing fish at our super

small, still registered through the meat inspection program facility.

And it took off.

People wanted local food.

There was obviously all the crazy shortages and people were

stockpiling and we just started rolling with it through Facebook

and we just started going with it.

So after about a month of that, we realized we are in some deep trouble here.

Like we are, this is getting way too big for this tiny little building and this

poor freezer's gonna die and we don't know what we're doing and oh my god.

So we quickly brought in the auditors for the other plants

and said, can we make this work?

Will you sign off on it?

And they said, yeah, here's the list of things you need to do.

So we tore it out on April the sixth, rebuilt the whole thing and head it

back into production by May the 27th.

We had some other in.

Some under other industry in the wild fisheries that were

shut down during this time.

They loaned us a bunch of equipment.

We had been doing everything by hand.

They loaned us equipment that would take the heads off fish and that

would split and fill it, the fish.

And then we were just trimming everything by hand.

And we just kept going, kept going and it kept going and we kept thinking, okay,

like everyone in 2020, it's gonna stop.

It's gonna stop, it's gonna stop, it's gonna stop.

It never stopped.

And so then we started investing in more equipment and we

started backpacking our fish.

And we just kept getting ev Every time we have this amazing group of

customers that we are so grateful for because they tell us our next steps.

They tell us, okay, we want the fish back.

We want the fish de-boned.

Have you thought about doing other fish?

And all of these different things.

And so we've just been taking signals as they come.

And yeah, now it's this incredible thing where we're selling direct to people.

Like I mentioned before, 15 to 1800 homes every month.

We're also dealing with smaller retailers, butcher shops small

grocery stores and working with them.

And we work with the Wild fishery.

We work with other fish farms and it's become its own whole business.

And we started, I should add, we're having fun.

We're talking with people, we're getting the word out about fish farms cuz so

many people don't have a clue what they are or that we're even here or

have been here for quite a few years.

And we're getting all this feedback and it's feeding us like feeding.

What we're doing, it's feeding our energy.

It's just been this absolutely incredible thing.

We were fortunate enough that obviously there was a lot of

people laid off during covid.

So we have a team of hairdressers that, literally a team of hairdressers

that trained into the processing plants and have, now that's where

they are, that's what they wanna do.

They don't wanna go back to hairdressing, they don't wanna

go back to delivery driving.

They just, and it was friends and family and anyone that was laid off, we just put

out the word and everybody came to help.

Like it is the coolest thing.

So that has been amazing.

And then because of that, we, got into other farming and other partnerships

and it's just, it's become this central focal point for a lot of what we do.

And in the meantime, the rest of the market now is stabilizing.

And so we're unbelievably grateful because, We're still here.

And we are able to take care of all of the families that work with us.

We have a lot of husband and wife duos that work with us.

We have father and son duos, we have father and daughter duos.

And we were able to keep all of these families safe and fed and

we were all making money and we didn't have to close our doors.

So like it's been just the greatest blessing ever.

And we've had a lot of fun with it.

It's been a lot of stress and a lot of holy shit moments cuz we're not

processors, but we're figuring it out.

And yeah, we now we're doing it.

It's pretty cool.

It's bit overwhelming at times, at just how amazing it's all turned out.

That

does sound like an incredible transformation for sure.

So what did, in terms of your workforce before and your workforce

now, how big of a change was

that?

So the farms they the core five, we'll call them have always

operated with 12 to 14 staff.

That much hasn't changed.

It's changed a little bit in the aspect that some of the farm on-farm staff

now also help in the processing plant.

The hours I guess, are a little reduced on the farm or not reduced, just displaced

or the days are calculated a little bit differently so that we can allow for time

to be working in the processing plants, which includes also hauling the fish

there and all of these different pieces.

We brought on.

Brought on a lot of part-time staff for working in the processing plan,

delivery, driving things like that.

It's definitely changed our administration a lot because now

we're not dealing with three to five customers, we're dealing with thousands.

So that's been a, the biggest, I think, overall change.

But we've very much kept it in the family, if that makes sense.

So even in our processing plant God rest his soul a really good family

friend who's retired, he came in and said, I'm gonna help you with this.

I know all about a kitchen.

Let's get it figured out.

And he brought his wife in and his best friend, and then he passed away in

March of this year, and his son came to us and said, I would like to step in.

And his son's wife also works with us.

And like it's, yeah it's been absolutely just amazing.

And so it's still in the family, like our delivery drivers, we laugh because

Allen Park, the population is probably like 52 people and I think we employ 20

of them just because it's Hey, you got a couple days a week, you wanna help us out?

And they do.

So it's pretty great.

So yeah, it it's changed a lot in that sense and it's

professionalized us in many ways.

And, but we've been able to, like our millwright is my husband's

best friend bringing him in.

It, so we've gotten better at certain areas, but it's still all just incredible

people that are intertwined way more than six points, that's for sure.

Yeah, so it's a lot more people, but good people,

great people now that we've, discussed feelings and all these

things that Katie is not comfortable with . No it's incredible to view your

community like that and to get that buy-in from friends and neighbors and

everybody.

But we've been, yeah, overwhelmingly taken care of.

My, my brother's mother-in-law works in the processing plant and she brought

on other hairdressers and people that were meeting jobs and yeah, I

think as talking about no, I was just gonna say as far as talking about

feelings, Katie, I was gonna say you're you, y'all are farmers, you get it.

You're more prepared for the bad than anything, and you're like

not shocked when shit happens.

It's more shocking to us that all this incredibleness has come our way.

That, that I think I'm like, I've been struggling with that for the last couple

weeks and just this is amazing and I don't know what we've done to deserve it.

And we're like, just fell doubtedly grateful.

And that's not an emotion that I, as a logistician I'm used to dealing with.

I think it says a lot about customer service work too,

that people would rather kill fish than deal with the public.

Having done customer service work, I would rather kill fish than deal with the public

Just saying, so I watched one of your real TikTok video, whatever

is the other day, the moving pictures Uhhuh, I believe, Uhhuh.

There might have been sound, we might even call it a talkie of you moving fish.

And it looked like they get vacuumed up and then Yep.

Spit out the other end, right?

Yep.

Totally spitballing because fish are fish.

Do you think they enjoy that or do they think they're being

abducted by like space aliens?

Do they think they're just swimming really fucking fast and they're like, look at me,

go, yes ? Or are they like, what the fuck?

They're all gonna die?

I think it's more like the, what the fuck?

I don't think they, things are gonna die, but I do think they're

like, where the hell am I going?

And yes, the alternative being that they used to be moved in nets like by

hand and they would be all scrunched up.

I think that, moving through the vortex is a lot nicer on them, but I absolutely

think they're going, like we know a lot about social hierarchies and fish

populations, and when you do something like that, it takes three days for

them to figure out where they are.

And if in.

When we're moving them, we're not just moving them.

So we're not just necessarily moving them from one tank to another.

Oftentimes they're being counted or they're being shipped off to another

facility or they're going through a greater, or a vaccination machine.

And so just that turmoil it takes them, sometimes the leaders of the pack have

been moved to another tank, so then they have to reestablish the leader.

So I, I think that in transit, they're more just what is going on?

Okay.

We can't comply because we don't, we're not supposed to, but this machine

is making us comply, so we're gonna, we're gonna go with it, but then

wherever we end up is the scary part.

That's when it takes them a few hot minutes and days to figure out,

okay, who's now the new leader?

What are we obeying?

Where is our food source?

It takes them about three days, depending on the water temperature,

but about three days, Annie, Hey.

It takes them about three days to figure out all of those things.

So yeah, it's that, that's more my concern is more on the other

end that's really trying to get

that interesting because I think as mammal farmers, we

don't think of non mammals really as having a social structure.

, maybe birds more, but it had honestly never occurred to me that Phish

would have a social structure.

Yep.

Because Yep, they're fish.

And that's been the common misconception, I

think for quite a few years.

People didn't think that Phish were really even sentient or had feelings

or could hear or any of these things.

And we as farmers have known for years, of course they can, we know that

there's all of these disruptions, but it's very mis everyone is misinformed

on the romances or the nuances that exist within the fish world.

And some much more than others.

It's just like different versions of meat birds, right?

Certain birds act this way.

Certain birds act that way.

It's the same with fish, or you could probably see it in species

of, I don't know, different strains of any form of livestock.

I have to admit that the way my brain works, I'm now

trying to picture what a romantic night would look like for fish.

Because they're gonna feel like the candle lit dinner is

probably out because they're you.

The candle lit dinner is definitely out.

The romance side of it involves a lot of biting.

They're into it.

, yes.

Then all they, we actually have to separate the boys from the

girls at a certain point because they bite the girls too much.

So what are some of your goals for your business going forward?

So our three main goals of our business at any given time at all

times are we taking care of our people?

That is our staff and our families are we.

Growing and being sustainable in the way that we want to, and by sustainability

being a very buzzword at this point.

But economically, socially, and environmentally, are those

actually being taken care of?

And then finally, are we having fun?

And if we're not having fun, if we're not enjoying it, then we pivot to something

that brings us as a collective, more joy.

So those are always our goals.

What I don't have, we don't have a big master business plan.

We are literally at all times flying by the seat of our pants.

We throw shit at the wall and we hope that some of it sticks.

In our case right now, everything's sticking, which is also terrifying.

So those are our three goals.

What we're really trying to figure out now for all of us, especially my husband

and I, is a little bit more balanced.

My husband has very much taken the lead on Manitoulin Island, so he's

gone for weeks and months at a time, which has been really hard on me and

really hard on my son, especially and subsequently than me again.

And so we're trying to figure out better balance for that moving forward

and then just balance all around for our staff to make sure that we do work

long, hard hours but we need to know that everybody's okay on the other side.

As for any, my rate of reasons, be it health or finances or any of those things.

So that's, those are our goals.

I don't have a huge plan.

We're just, we're trying to strike some balance right now.

Those are some,

Amazing goals and things to always be keeping in the forefront though.

Just focusing on those alone is huge.

Yeah.

Everything we do, we ask ourselves.

Those three areas.

. Arlene: And like you said, if you

and they all work, then . Yeah.

You don't need to think too much fur further, but you, you're

still, you're still in fast forward trying to figure it all out.

Yeah.

We are, we're project junkies, which we have to be mindful of.

We, just because we think we can do it doesn't mean we necessarily should.

Yeah, that's right.

So before you came home, you were working in international development.

Yep.

So you talked a little bit about the family aspect of coming home, but

what was that transition like and what was the decision like in coming

back to Canada after working in that?

I had been struggling with it for a while already.

I was 27, 28 at the time.

And I'd been struggling just with, I was, I loved it.

It was all of the best and the worst, but the worst were just

like really good adventure stories.

But it was, I was jet setting all over the place, so I was flying everywhere

I was doing cool shit, blowing up landmines and just really cool work.

But I was starting to get tired and I was starting to wonder like, what am I doing?

This is all really cool adventures.

And I to be doing that stuff in your twenties, this like absolutely the

optimal time to be just absolutely crazy.

You have nothing holding you back from doing anything.

But as you got, as I got a little bit older, it was just like I didn't

know anymore and I had some personal issues that had set me back and I.

I just didn't really know anymore and I couldn't really push beyond them.

I just, I was it, divine timing, interceded, I guess you can say.

So sometimes still I miss that.

Part of my life where I was completely uninhibited and

I could do whatever I want.

And I didn't have a husband and a son and my parents to take care of.

And I didn't feel the weight of all of this responsibility.

Sometimes I miss that, romantically, but then I remember the cost of

some of those things as well.

So as far as the transition, I'm still not like super, super

socially networked into the area.

I'm like got all my staff, which are also like all friends and family.

So I never really conquered that part of it.

Fortunately, I married, I basically married the

equivalent of the boy next door.

So his family's like super socially connected and everything, and so

they prod me out occasionally.

So that part I never, I haven't really developed cause I've just thrown

all of my stuff into this company.

But yeah, so that, that was different.

I sometimes miss the adventure, but by the same token, all of the

skills and all of the stuff I was negotiating all kinds of pieces.

So when I was overseas I apply all of that to what I'm doing now,

whether it's, working with other companies or working with First

Nations groups or all of these things.

So all the skills that I learned from that are being applied

here, it's very funny to me.

I would say sometimes it was a lot easier doing it when you're negotiating

in a Congo versus negotiating with a bunch of unruly fish farmers.

But, it's it all comes together.

So the transition in itself, because I had lived a transitional lifestyle

for 10 years, literally jumping all over the globe, wasn't that

different to just jump into something.

I met actually my partner who's not technically my husband legally but my, I'm

not allowed to call him my partner cause he thinks everyone thinks I'm a lesbian.

My husband, I'll just continue to refer to him as that.

My husband was the boy that bought me beer in high school.

So he, it took him 13 years to actually ask me out.

And he did.

And we started seeing each other and yeah, he, he literally, we

got pregnant completely on a whim.

It was a very happy accident.

So it's been navigating that.

And I live here at the farm and my parents also choose to

live here at the farm with us.

So it's that whole multi-generational thing, which is really cool and really

hard at the same time, my mom is very O c D and clean and everything is

designer, and I'm absolute fucking chaos.

And the dogs are everywhere and there's glitter around things and

yeah, so the, we navigate those things.

So I think the biggest transition is just that you can't just leave.

You have to make things work.

That's been the biggest part.

I was very good at taking a contract in a very far away place to get a very far away

from whatever I was dealing with things.

So that's probably the hardest part about the transition.

Yeah.

It's really hard too, as someone who moved a lot and was on the go a lot to

just not , to make the transition to staying in one place and doing one thing.

Yeah.

How does your previous work influence how you look at food production?

And also would you say then that being an entrepreneur and dealing with

farmers and your family is more or less stressful than blowing up landmines?

, Arlen: I would say it's way more

that you just said you're here.

You have to face it every minute of every day.

And this unburdening like responsibility or burdening, not unburdening, burdening

responsibility that I have all the time.

And I don't mean that to sound negative, I just mean that responsibility has

like an incredible amount of weight if you don't keep it in check at times.

Cause sometimes I think especially women are really good at feeling

like we have to make sure everything's going good all the time.

feel like landmines too probably are pretty

self-limiting, stress , blowing up.

Either you blow up or you don't like it's pretty, yeah.

Yep.

Exactly.

You know where working family is.

Yeah you you have to be careful with the blowups in family.

They have a lot more ripple effects, that's for sure.

I would say everything influenced it because I didn't realize, I guess when

I was younger that I was already being taught the skills to being a huge problem

solver, which my dad was teaching us and my mom was teaching us on the farms.

And my mom was a incredible, one of those crazy women in the eighties

that was just like forging ahead for women in the workforce and

really high level professional jobs.

So she was already, we were already being taught all these skills were

groomed, I guess you could say.

And I didn't really realize that the time.

So a lot of that stuff came into play when I was working

overseas and I did everything overseas, like landmines sounds.

It was one very small part of one of my contracts.

But I also did a lot of negotiation.

So I specialized in working in post emerging economies.

So post-conflict immersion economies such as Angola, Mozambique, Sudan Congo,

which is still in problem Ethiopia, Iraq.

So negotiating and what I was doing there is very similar to what I'm

doing now in bringing people together.

So if there were international companies that wanted to start work in

a country such as Angola, they didn't know what the laws of the land were.

It's no one thing to know what the regulations in the book are, but it's

to actually know what the cultural rules are and all of those things.

So I would help I would find those partnerships and make those partnerships

between local companies and international companies and getting them all set up and

getting them to work on various things.

It could be building railroads, it could be oil fields, it could be diamond mines,

it could be all different kinds of things.

So those same things apply here.

Our industry has gone through many fractures.

Over the years so many fractures from, there's these land-based

facilities such as ours, and then there was these new net pen facilities.

And the net pen guys obviously produced a huge volume of fish in

comparison to the land-based guys.

But the land-based guys were the ones that got this province on the

map when it came to fish farming, but they didn't talk to each other.

They actually, the, there's like an inferiority complex

that was being dealt there.

So part of my thing when I came in was getting everybody back together,

like we're all raising fish.

The question of competition doesn't exist in our industry in Ontario.

We still import two times what we produce here.

So there's no question of sales.

Talking with suppliers and all that and bringing everyone to the same page.

I myself plus a another woman some will say we hijacked the industry association.

We got rid of all the government funding.

It had turned into like many industry associations, just a

group that was looking for funding.

So you'd create all these projects and do silly things just to get

the funding to keep your staff.

We took that all back and we said, no, stand up as an industry.

Stand up, put your money in and let's stand up.

Let's do the lobbying, let's do the work.

So all of those things continue to apply.

And then obviously I'm dealing with these dinosaur facilities,

so I call them my old dinosaurs.

They have good bones they have great water.

But we needed to completely retrofit them and rebuild them, but not rebuild their

bones because of regulational problems.

Being able to do all that, this is just similar skills to building refugee camps

in, in Iraq for Syrians, I just used the tools we have, which were the guys

that run these facilities for years.

Their ideas and rebuilt it.

The Syrians were the ones that built their own refugee camp.

It's the same philosophy.

So everything is intertwined.

And having to learn a lot of cultural patience and a number of different

languages to do my job before it's the same thing working here.

We have the same or similar problems when we talk about, everyone wants

to talk about reconciliation.

What does that really mean?

And very much what, this industry has done really well, is working

together with First Nations, not a question of repairing the damage, which

everyone thinks it's moving forward.

So having worked in emerging economies is all about working ahead

and that's what we're doing here.

And as an in, as an industry, that's what we're doing on an individual

level and as a group level.

So it, it all intertwines and becomes very blurry, but every skillset.

I learned before I went off, and then I honed it in and then I continue

to hone in on what I'm doing.

And I'm not saying I'm doing it all right.

Cause I'm definitely not.

But I keep learning every day, so

I don't wanna get too far into it.

But you've talked a couple of times about government regulations and

limiting expansion or new facilities.

, is that, is the justification be behind that environmental or

what is the kind of the potential

there's take on No, there's just a complete lack of education.

You want the honest answer.

So there's we, everyone's seen the headlines where, fish

farms are killing the world.

Not exactly.

True.

I can get into that and we could have a whole, three day

long discussion about that.

But the basis is

same as farmers, right?

Yeah.

. Exactly.

All farmers.

Exactly.

We're all killing the world.

We're feeding you, but we're all killing at the same time.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, we're the only ones that are actually worried about

what the weather's gonna look like, next year or 10 years or 20 years.

Or generational farms that have been tracking it for hundreds of years.

Yeah.

And preserving the land that we're working on that we have to because we

have such limited Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

And we could chat about that forever.

When it comes to fish farms, it's it's a lack of education

of any bureaucratic process.

And the easiest thing as Canadians is to just say, no,

we don't open up for new things.

Y'all have dealt with C F I a many times when you try to get new

products registered that you see registered anywhere in the world and

you're going, what the hell's wrong?

We don't know.

So no, we're not comfortable.

No.

So the regulations that exist around land-based farms are the

equivalent of what's registered for a wastewater treatment plant.

I have the same permits, but the permit that I have to take water

because they don't, they can't possibly fathom the fact that the water runs

through the farm and runs back out.

And it's actually the same or better than it was when I took it in with

the same WA permit as water bottling facility with the idea that the water

is consumed and leaving this area.

That's not true.

Not at all.

And then the permit that I have to put the water back because there isn't a

box for aquaculture, is the same permit to put the water back for a wastewater

treatment facility, which then means that all of the waste that I have on any

of my facilities is as toxic as human waste in a wastewater treatment facility.

So it's because nothing exists.

Our forefathers in the Constitution did not ever think we could culture.

So we have two, two lines with multiple

bureaucracies too.

In each of those different,

I deal with nine different, yeah, nine different regulatory bodies.

, yikes.

Nine different regulatory bodies when it comes to the production of fish in Canada.

Yeah.

And it's dissuading and so a lot of people don't get involved.

New people see that and they hear the story of my dad, and there's, my

dad's not the only story like this.

We're nine years.

Can you imagine that you're devoting all of your time and your effort making no

money because all you're trying to do is track down and have meetings and find

out what the hell people's problems are.

Who can do that?

I certainly can't.

That's why we bought these old farms, because I wasn't gonna

be as tenacious as my dad.

There's farms sitting the money is some of the bigger entities.

The money's sitting there, but they can't get permits because no one

knows how to permit and it's scary.

And what if someone gets upset?

And like you said, it's really what a still, we're still importing

this product, so Oh yeah.

We have, yeah, we have people who want to raise these products here that,

that, ah, that people are consuming,

but yeah.

And you guys know better than anyone Nimbyism runs strong.

Yes.

Yeah, that's true.

And that is very much a problem.

We don't, we want bitch about it, but we don't actually wanna, step up

and have good local food production.

Or if we do have good local food production, we don't want it.

We don't want it in our area.

We want to just know that it's Canadian, but it should be in the tundra.

We don't wanna see it.

All of our cattle, all of our livestock should all be moved into

the middle of nowhere where there's never gonna be a natural resource

that anyone wants to extract.

So that we just know that our food is Canadian, therefore it's healthy.

And that's that.

I know

As a small.

Pastor based beef producer, people want their cows to be raised the way we raise

our cows, but they want enough of them to be able to eat beef at every meal for

a very low price, and they still want to be able to live in the country, and

they don't want cows anywhere near them.

Yep.

Yep.

That doesn't, you can't, it is not physically possible

to have all of those things.

And I think what makes me so angry about so much of this regulatory stuff

is that there are things that really do need that level of regulation, but we're

wasting so much time and money on shit.

Like making you get a wastewater treatment permit for raising fish,

versus actually putting that time and money towards something that actually

needs that level of oversight that then, you just lump everything in

together and Oh, it's all the same.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No.

And we're not an ingrained part of Canadian culture either, so

we still, we think of wild fish.

Everyone thinks there's this infinite amount of wild

fish everywhere that's gone.

It's been gone for a while in certain areas.

It's been gone a very long while.

And that's just not a reality.

And as you just mentioned, you want all this beautiful pasture raised

fish or beef or chicken or pork.

You want all of those beautiful things, but you wanna pay a dollar 99 a

pound, and you wanna eat it every day.

Those things just can't go hand in hand.

They just can't.

No that's

exactly it.

I would love for everybody to be eating beautiful beef, yep.

Whether that's corned or grassfed or whatever.

But you can't get it for a 99 cent hamburger.

That's not how it works.

No.

And it, and then they're going on about lab grown meat

instead, and I just, blah, blah.

Yeah.

Look, but the alternative also is that we all eat a little bit less meat,

which nobody else wants to hear either.

And and no offense to you as a beef producer, but we should not be eating

meat, no beef three times a day.

We really shouldn't be.

It's really not great.

Don't tell my father that though.

He was strongly discre

. Arlene: You mean he doesn't

a day?

My dad used to only joke that he would only eat fish when the budget was low.

. Really?

I know.

Like how ridiculous is that?

And I will say that I eat fish probably three to five times a week.

My brother and his partner probably eat fish eight times a week.

Like we, it's just a, it's a cultural or a generational difference.

. I think, but yeah no.

He, we were not raised, and when we did eat fish, it was literally because

my dad would only let us eat fish that weren't gonna be sold for money.

. So we, as y'all know as farmers, right?

It's that old animal.

That's what we were eating.

So my, my love of fish was not high when I was a kid.

Yeah,

it's a slightly different product

than a nap.

Yeah, it's a very different product.

And fish, you don't just turn into hamburger.

Some producers do, but we do not.

So anyways, yeah, no, we're eating old stringy, brooded stock, not enough

lemon pepper in this world and not make that taste like a leather shit.

I know we

were talking to a lamb producer earlier this week about,

at least in our area, how many old guys ate mutton in the army and Yep.

That's what they think of when they think of lamb.

And I'm like, there's.

No.

, no.

There's so many better ways to eat it.

And even what we produce I go for the smaller fish every time.

Like when we're cutting in the plant, I'll steal the small fillets because they're

the lamb, they're the veal, they're the, that beautiful, soft, succinct meat.

But yeah, no, it all depends.

But no, my dad's my dad would eat beef or pork every day meal.

And he doesn't care for chicken and he doesn't care for fish.

So unless it's shrimp, but we could talk about the sustainability

of shrimp being an issue too.

Oh, we could just talk for hours, I imagine.

All right, I'm gonna bring us into that parenting question because you're talking

about your dad, but we wanna also know about raising a little one on a fish farm.

So I'm picturing little life jackets.

Maybe that's not a thing.

It is for my toddler life.

No it, it is.

I have one of those crazy, cautious kids.

Those ones that are just, they're just born that way.

So I'm super fortunate, in the celestial land of my kid choosing to come to

me, he knew exactly who he needed to be to make it through this life.

He he asks lots of questions.

He's cautious and he only does things when he's comfortable with doing them.

For example, walking across tanks, there's a three foot metal

walkway, very safe, very constant.

He will walk across those by himself.