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6/11/03

Perseverance, ingenuity pay off for trout farmers

By Becky Johnson
On the first day that Sally Eason noticed rainbow trout in the concrete raceways were dying, she brushed it off.

Even at the base of Cold Mountain, it was a hot summer. The lack of rain meant creek levels were down, and the water spilling over the Lake Logan dam into the trout farm was warmer than trout like. Trout losses during the peak of summer are just part of the business, Eason told herself.

But as trout continued to die by the thousands over the next couple of days, Eason called a grocery and asked if they would take a larger shipment than normal, maybe a tractor-trailer load more than normal.

Working all day and into the night to process the dying fish, they sold off what they could for half-price. Rain was nowhere in sight, and temperatures continued to hover in the upper 80s.

Within two weeks, every trout on Eason’s farm had died. That was 1986, the year Eason had taken over the family’s trout farm in Sunburst from her father, Dick Jennings.

“I remember this like it was yesterday,” Eason said of the decision that faced her and her husband, Steve. “After a lot of soul searching whether we were going to stay in or get out, we went down to good old Bob Massie at First Citizens and got a loan to get back in.”

Today, Eason is one of the top trout producers on the East Coast. She has been on the Food Network, spoken at chef’s conferences in New York City, been featured in numerous food magazines and is a considered a connoisseur in one of the hottest new specialty food markets — trout caviar. Her trout has gained national accolades in eco-circles due to her use of feed that has no antibiotics, no hormones and no meat by-products.

Eason knows some 100 trout recipes, and is always looking for winners to add to their value-added prepared products line-up — one that includes trout burgers, trout dip, marinated trout, smoked trout, cold smoked trout and caviar.

Most of Sunburst’s specialty products were created on a whim.

“About four years ago, we started wondering, ‘hey, why are we throwing away all the eggs?” Eason described of their caviar revelation.

Then there’s the smoked trout dip, made using the small tender pieces of smoked trout that fall off the delicate filets on the smoking rack.

Trout burgers developed in a similar way. When pin-boning trout for boneless filets, a thin strip of the meat is sliced off to expose the tiny hair-like pin bones, which are then removed.

“At the end of the day, you may have a pile of 15 pounds of that premium meat that you just throw away,” Eason said. So they experimented until they found a winning trout burger made from the scraps.

“Most of our employees are very willing to be guinea pigs. They’ll take recipes home and try them on their families who say ‘oh, that’s disgusting’ or ‘yeah, we’re getting there,’” Eason said.

Finding guinea pigs for the caviar was a little trickier.

“That’s not something everybody is willing to belly up to the table and say, ‘Yeah, I’ll try some of that,’” Eason said.

So Eason had to acquire the taste herself as she experimented with different levels of salt.

“Amazingly enough, I really like it now,” Eason said.

So much so that when she was in New York City for a recent food show, she ordered the “caviar staircase,” a menu item at Tru restaurant that features piles of different caviars arranged in a miniature spiral staircase. “Five years ago, I never in a million years would have ordered that. It was absolutely phenomenal.”

Sunburst’s caviar sales have quintupled in two years.

“In the last 25 years, the southern United States has gone from thinking the only fish you could eat is fried catfish to caviar. That’s a big leap,” Eason said.

While the expanding palates of the general public are a factor in caviar sales, Eason attributes her increased caviar sales to a problem halfway around the world. The sturgeon fish of the Caspian Sea, the only source of the world’s caviar until recently, have been over-fished to dangerously low levels. The unsustainable harvest of sturgeon for caviar has made the item a major faux pas among upscale chefs and diners, so they are turning to domestic, farm-raised caviars, which can only be harvested from a few species.

Given these realities — and others — Eason sees nothing but continued growth for the entire trout industry.

Studies show fish is the healthiest meat. Omega 3 vitamins and fish oils are credited with everything from lowering cholesterol to curing depression. The American Heart Association recently recommended two servings of fish per day. Meanwhile, media attention about polluted ocean waters and over-fishing in the seas are turning consumers away from saltwater seafood.


Trout line-up

It takes the skilled processors at Sunburst 20 minutes to dress a 200-pound bucket of fish from the time they’re hauled from the pond to when they land on ice at the end of the line. The trout could pass through as many as eight hands, tossed and flung from table to table in the processing station.

The fish are scooped from the raceways just outside the big bay doors of the processing station and dumped in an ice slush where they die from hypothermia. Then they begin their quick trip down the line — deheaded, de-ribbed, cut into fillets, trimmed of belly fat, tails and fins. At that crossroads, they can go the straight fillet route, the butterfly route, the boneless fillet route or the fancy, square-cut route.

At the end of the line, the finished fish are sorted into iced boxes — 10 clean-cut for Pasquales in Waynesville, a dozen fillets for Expressions in Hendersonville, another order for Sourwood in Asheville, and one for the Purple Onion in Saluda. These small individual restaurant orders are a small percentage of the company’s business, but it’s worth it to provide the region with a menu of fresh trout caught hours before for the evening entrees.


The birth of trout farming

Eason’s father, Dick Jennings, is the father of the Western North Carolina trout industry. He started the Cashiers Valley Trout Farm in 1948, launching what is now an $8 million industry for the region. The North Carolina trout trade — which is concentrated in less than a dozen western counties — is second only to Idaho in trout production.

Dick Jennings started the trout farm as an alternative to re-enrolling in college at Yale after returning home for the World War II.

A huge tract of land near Cashiers — stretching from Sapphire Valley to Lake Toxoway — had served as the family’s summer retreat away from Pittsburgh for decades. Jennings decided to make it his permanent home, building a small cabin and started a mink fur farm following the war. A couple of years later, he started the trout farm.

For nearly two decades, he ran both operations. But facing tough competition from Scandinavian fur traders, he quit the mink farm in 1965. Meanwhile, Jennings had started a second trout operation in Haywood County near Lake Logan called Jennings Trout Company. He ran both trout farms for a decade.

In 1975, Eason and her husband Steve, took over the Cashiers Valley Trout Farm from her father. In 1985, she took over the operations of Jennings Trout Company, too, and leased the Cashiers Valley Trout Farm to another trout farmer.

There are nearly 50 trout farms in 10 western counties, and 65 in all of Western North Carolina. Only a few are as large as Sunburst, where the company processes its own fish for large distribution. Several trout farms hatch eggs and raise fingerlings that are sold to larger trout farms where they are raised to maturity. Others farms raise trout to stock streams and private ponds and to sell to wholesale processors or other trout farms.