North American Fish Farmers Cooperative

Growing tilapia, a warm water tropical fish, in cold weather North Dakota might seem as out of place as…well…a fish out of water. Yet a few enterprising farmers have done just that, with notable success. The result is an emerging aquaculture industry in the state. 

One of the first North Dakota farmers to diversify into aquaculture is Mark Willows, a Binford cattle producer. He saw the addition of tilapia as a way to increase his family’s income after returning from an entrepreneurial seminar in Wyoming. Unfortunately, not long after beginning this new endeavor, the combination of low prices and high expansion costs forced him to turn from producer to marketing director for the North American Fish Farmers Cooperative. Today the cooperative represents five producers from throughout the region and continues to thrive. 

Mark explains, “We received a grant from the Northwest Area Foundation for the first five years to help get the cooperative up and running. The fish are raised on three farms in North Dakota, a very large farm at Renville, Minnesota, and one in South Dakota. The cooperative works with various growers from here to Virginia who are not full fledged co-op members but market with them. Financially speaking it is not a get rich thing by any means, but it’s a diversification to their own farming business that can add a little value, too.” 

A few of the farmers have renovated some of their farm buildings to accommodate the fish stock flown in from Florida. Mark goes on to paint a picture of these hearty parcels. “All of our farms get their tilapia out of a Florida hatchery. They are flown in. From two- to five-thousand quarter-inch fry are packaged into a box with a little water…in a bag like what you would take a gold fish home in from a pet store, and flown here overnight.” 

Once they arrive, the fish are fed specially mixed fish food. “The fish are vegetarians, for lack of a better word,” Mark offers. “The feed is a mixture of grains, a little bit of fish meal, and a vitamin and mineral supplement. It is specially mixed and will float to the top. The fish have to come to the surface to grab it.” 

The success of this business depends on a biological system where all the elements need to click to maintain a healthy environment for the fish to mature. Mark puts it in simple terms, “You got water, you got fish, you got oxygen, and then you have your filters, which are another whole living organism. You actually grow bacteria to convert ammonia nitrogen into nitrates. It’s a complicated biological ecosystem where everything has to work correctly on a continual basis or nothing will work.”

Waste is another element that must be properly managed. “Waste is filtered out of the water,” comments Mark. “The water is 90% reused going through a filtration process, cleaned up and reused in the system. Ten percent per day goes into what they call a settling pond where the waste is settled out. Farmers clean it out once a year and apply it as fertilizer on fields in the area, much like livestock farmers do.”

North American Fish Farmers Cooperative has established a lucrative niche market for their product. “These fish are popular with the Chinese and Vietnamese. They prefer them delivered live,” Mark comments. “We have two specialized flatbed semi-trucks with specialized fish tanks on them that hold water so the fish are shipped live.” Contract haulers travel once a week to Chinatowns in Toronto and Vancouver. “The cooperative also delivers to most of the larger cities that have Asian populations, such as Chicago, New York City, Houston, Dallas, and Calgary.” 

Overcoming resistance to North Dakota-grown tilapia was a struggle at first. First- time customers were wary of the quality of the fish when it arrived because of the shipping distance traveled. “It’s a 24-hour drive by truck into Toronto and 32 hours into Vancouver, but once we did it,” Mark confides, “we proved to them that we could do it, and everything’s been going great since.” 

Mark eagerly points to another benefit that has resulted from the cooperative. “Establishing our marketing operation here has proven favorable for Binford. There are two of us that now have full-time jobs with the cooperative. Besides that, the cooperative bought this building and renovated it. It was an empty building, a hardware store that had gone out of business. We bought it, remodeled it, and rent out office space. We now have three other businesses housed out of here that were not in town before.”

The future, from Mark’s point of view, looks bright for aquaculture in North Dakota. “All the reports that I read suggest that aquaculture is the future for seafood and fish production. Supplies in the natural waters are going down, and limits are being placed on commercial fishing for some species. Seafood is still a healthy product that doctors recommend for consumption, and it seems like the younger generations are eating a lot more seafood than before. I believe the outlook is very positive. Everything is gearing towards farmeries of seafood.”