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What are our options when it comes to seafood? Farmed fish is often raised with antibiotics and even fed food coloring to dye its flesh to make it appear healthier. The process of wild-caught fish regularly leaves other sea creatures trapped in the nets, only to be discarded and wasted. Sustainable aquaculture shows us that there is a way to raise and harvest fish (and eat them) that is better for them, the environment, and our health!
Ty Walker runs Smoke In Chimneys, a revitalized 1930s trout hatchery in Virginia, and today, he reveals what’s possible when it comes to identifying and enjoying quality seafood. Today, Ty goes over what’s going on with most farmed fish and industrial-scale wild fishing. He reveals issues with overfishing, the “fresh” label on our seafood, and microplastics in our oceans and fish. He points out that sustainable aquaculture is much like regenerative farming; it presents a sustainable and viable option that honors our environment and nurtures our well-being.
Check out Ty’s website smokeinchimneys.com
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Episode Transcript
Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda.
Is all farmed fish bad, and is wild caught as good as it sounds? This is episode 484, and our guest is Ty Walker. He is the Owner of Smoke and Chimneys, a revitalized 1930s trout hatchery in Southwestern Virginia. There, he raises trout for table fare, sending it to restaurants and retailers around the Mid-Atlantic region.
Ty exposes big fish, the fish industry that is not unlike big ag, both of which are more concerned with profit than our health. Ty discusses why most farmed fish are indeed problematic and why even wild-caught is less than ideal. He goes into detail about the problems with industrial-scale wild fishing, why filets are often pushed on the consumer rather than the whole fish, the problem of overfishing, the lack of regulations on the word fresh, and a host of other issues. The bottom line is he shows us that we have alternatives between farmed fish and wild-caught. There is a sustainable aquaculture movement afoot, and Ty clues us in about it.
Before we get into the conversation, are you curious about the safety of raw milk? Do you wonder about its availability? Go to our website, Real Milk, for reliable information on real raw milk. There are articles, blog posts, videos, and podcasts that explain why raw milk is healthy, its amazing benefits, and where you can obtain it in the United States. You’ll also find insights into the politics and economics of raw milk and industrial milk. Go to Real Milk, a project of the Weston A. Price Foundation.
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Check out Ty’s Website: Smoke and Chimneys
Visit our website for more resources: Weston A. Price and Real Milk
Visit our sponsors: One Earth Health and Optimal Carnivore
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Welcome to the show, Ty.
Hilda, thanks for having me.
I thought all farmed fish was bad. Talk to me and try to convince me otherwise.
First, I want to agree with you. Most fish farms are terrible, but if I asked you, are all pork farms created equal, what would you say?
Not at all. There’s a huge difference between a confined animal feeding operation and one in which the pigs can live according to their pigness. They’re routing around with their snouts and living up to their full potential there, enjoying the sunshine and the care of a place where they’re raised sustainably.
I would ask, do you think that same paradigm can apply to fish farms?
It had never crossed my mind that it could.
I’m not interviewing you. I’m just trying to lay a little bit of groundwork here. It’s interesting that if you saw a conventional pork operation and you said, “I don’t agree with that. I don’t agree with how those animals are being raised,” I am only going to eat wild pigs. Do you see where I’m going with that? The response isn’t a critical response. How can we work with the cycles and systems of nature to raise pigs better? How can we figure this out?
In the fish world, it’s interesting that it’s like, “I don’t like fish farms. I’m just going to eat wild fish.” Let me be clear. I feel like I have to have all these precursors. I am not anti-wild caught fish at all. I do want to lay a little groundwork though. When we say wild-caught, what does that even mean? In our mind, we have this picture of a guy on a boat with a fishing rod. There couldn’t be any further things.
The Industrial Scale Wild Fishing
There are three types. We’re talking industrial-scale wild fishing. The first activity is called purse sanding. We’re talking about military technology being used to catch fish, like sonar radar and helicopters. Helicopters will find schools of fish. You have speed boats that surround the school of fish with huge nets. You have other boats that pull these nets up, and everything that is caught in that net dies, like sea turtles, seals, and any other types of fish that they’re not even targeting. That can be up to 40% of stuff in the net that gets thrown back into the ocean because it wasn’t targeted. That’s bad,
The second is the long lining, which means there’s a multiple-mile-long cable with thousands of baited hooks on this line. It’s left out there for a day or two, and they reel in whatever is on the line. There’s no way to deter anything and everything. They might throw away 40% of all those fish that were on those hooks because that wasn’t the fish they were going for.
The last thing is a deep water trawler, which is going to drop a big net to the bottom of the ocean. It’s going to scrape up everything. It’s the equivalent of slashing and burning in the Amazon. It’s going to disturb the whole bottom and pull all those fish up. When we say wild-caught, we’re talking about one of those three fishing practices.
We have idealized what it is. I did picture a man with a fishing rod and a line. He is pulling up a fish one by one. Who knows how long that would take him? There is collateral damage for the marine life in the scenarios you’re painting. Let’s talk about the issues with farmed fish before we get into the middle ground that you’re describing of doing it in a regenerative sustainable way.
Farmed fish is generally frowned upon as far as I understand it because, like concentrated animal feeding operations, the fish are kept in tight quarters. They don’t see the sun. They’re given dyes to make their flesh look more pink if it’s salmon, for example. You think it’s healthy. The fish get sick. They probably give them antibiotics. It’s all the same issues that we see with the land livestock. Is that right?
You described it. It’s all those things. They’re crowded. There are antibiotics in the feed. There are tons of issues. We live in a society where we don’t want the skin, head, tail, or bones. We just want our little boneless filet of fish. This is amazing because the industry has pushed that. If you have a fish that walked off the black pearl, half its face rotted off, its fins are all beaten up, and it’s been packed in there with a bunch of fish, it’s amazing because they’ve created a product where you don’t know what that fish looked like.
They take a filet off and serve it to you. You can’t look at that thing and know anything about it. That’s interesting because a healthy fish is going to look healthy. The outbreaks in the salmon world, these fish look beyond bad, and they’re still being eaten. You go to the grocery store. You feel good that you got a nice piece of fish, and never mind that it was disease-ridden.
This is also the origin of baby carrots, as I understand it. In other words, they didn’t find the produce appealing. I’m not saying it was messed up. They were like, “Let’s shave it down to these little bite-sized pieces that people might buy.” They were trying to serve the public something that they were creating a demand for. You are right. I hadn’t thought about it before. We don’t get to see the whole fish. We see a little filet. Let’s go now and talk about this third way. It’s an option between the wild caught and the farm fish conditions that we were describing that none of us want. What’s the third way?
I want to answer it. Let me say two other things real quick. I get it. The assumption behind wild-caught fish is the fish are being raised in a clean environment. That’s the assumption. In 25 years, there will be as much plastic in the ocean as there is fish cumulatively in weight.
In 25 years, it’ll be as much plastic as fish.
UC Davis did a study. They went up and down the coast of California, went to every fresh fish market, and sampled all the fresh fish. They were coming in locally. They found microplastics in 25% of all the fish.
That doesn’t surprise me.
I’m not anti-wild caught, but why am I going to pay $10 to $12 a pound for ground beef from Polyface? It’s because there is a level of control that’s going into that product where you know beyond a shadow of a doubt it is being raised correctly. There’s an element of control that you want as a consumer. Fish out in the ocean eating plastic. The mercury is coming from all the coal plants. All the recommendations about mercury levels in wild fish, there’s plastic in 25% of it. Look at the way it’s farmed. It’s not as picturesque because a lot of our pretense around the ocean is a week-long beach vacation, or we go to a sunset at the beach. You can’t go and visit. You can’t get on board one of these fishing ships. It’s hard to see what happens.
Even in a wild-caught scenario, domestically, the fish is going to be put on a fishing vessel. The fish is then going to be gone to a primary processor at one facility. They’re going to take the head off and gut it. That fish is going to go to a different facility where they’re going to filet the fish. From there, it goes to another facility for distribution. It then goes to a grocery store. Even in a situation like that, it’s still changing hands 5 or 6 times the same product before it gets to the grocery store, and you can buy it and eat it.
I hadn’t thought about all these layers. Some of us are careful about the source of our red meat, pork, or chicken on the table. We hadn’t thought about this fish because we’d idealized the wild-caught scenario. I know Ty that you and Shannon have bought an antique hatchery. This has been around for a while. Talk to us about this third way, this regenerative way of fish farming.
Regenerative Way Of Fishing
I operate a 1930s trout hatchery in Southwest Virginia, where we run our facility. There’s a 3,000-gallon-a-minute beautiful spring that’s feeding our raceways and ponds. It’s amazing that the water there is coming out of the ground at 52 degrees year-round. It has a pH of 8. It’s naturally alkaline. The key to fish farming is like with pork farming. What’s the difference between a commodity pork operation and Polyface or White Oak Pasture? It’s night and day. Your Polyface and White Oak Pastures regenerative agriculture land-based is trying to mimic natural systems and natural environments.
We’re doing the same thing in our hatchery. The fish are out in these cold water ponds, earth, and ponds. There’s vegetation. They’re eating bugs in the evening. It has low densities. It’s a beautiful symbiotic relationship that a fish farm can have with the fish. I’m trying to paint pictures that are familiar to folks. The pasture pork versus the commodity pork. It’s been amazing to see what we can do with aquaculture and to see that wild fish stocks are down 90%.
Did you know that 90 million pounds is the haul every year from the ocean? Did you know that that number has stabilized and even started declining since 2002? The demand for seafood in terms of what the population is doing over time. The demand outstrips the supply 10 to 1. Here we are in the fourth quarter of it all, and nobody is saying anything
I have heard about overfishing. I hadn’t wrapped my head around the concept. What you’re saying is we’re extracting more from the ocean than it can even keep up with.
Farmed fish is now half of the whole seafood industry. It’s interesting that the roots of aquaculture, the first primarily farm salmon businesses that were getting off the ground, took funding from big ag. Big ag inserted their mindset and ethos of this mono-cultured, high-density thought process into raising fish. That is why fish farming does not have a good name. It is amazing. There are operations all over the world that have consciously crafted structures and systems in place to mimic the natural environment to raise healthy, amazing fish that don’t have plastics, don’t have mercury, and all this stuff that a potential wild fish could have.
Farm fish is now half of the whole seafood industry.
What’s so cool is that, for example, where you’re doing it with your fish, it’s a natural environment. I’ve been to your hatchery. I saw the clean water coming down the mountainside and springing up on your property. You don’t have them in some artificial tanks. I always assumed it was farm fish or wild-caught, and that was it. I never realized there were more possibilities. While we’re doing it in a regenerative sense for the land, we could do it for the fish. For the livestock, we could also do it in a regenerative way for the fish.
We sell our fish through Polyface. We pasture our own website. In the past several years, we’ve gotten into some Michelin-star restaurants. It’s amazing to see regenerative aquaculture come on the scene like regenerative agriculture has in the past fifteen years.
Can you tell us more about the process from start to finish?
We hatch fish from eggs there on the property. It’s about a fourteen-month process. We’re raising the fish from eggs. It’s amazing that once they’ve hatched, we start the eggs on minced grass-fed beef liver, which is amazing. The liver is one of the most nutrient-dense substances on the planet. Back in the 1930s, during the era when our hatchery was built, they fed organ meats. That was the primary food they used for the fish.
How do you know?
I’ve eaten, slept, and read this thing for however long I’ve been here. It’s amazing because even in all the books from the 1930s, the recommended feed was ground organ meats. They fed roadkill to the trout back in the 1930s. Arguably, it’s a clean feed. It’s cool that we were doing it right 100 years ago. It got all screwed up. Here we are trying to go backward to go forward.
Coming up, Ty tells us what we can do as consumers to support regenerative aquaculture and why salmon is the fish you see the most often on restaurant menus.
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Talk to us more about the process. You get them as eggs. What time do you harvest the fish to sell them at restaurants and markets and so forth?
We have a hatchery building where we hatch the fish. It’s inside the little fry. They’re fragile. They need a controlled environment. Once they leave there, they go to a couple of concrete. They’re called raceways. The water is about 3 feet deep. It’s about 100 gallons a minute. Once they get big enough that every bird and frog in the world could eat them, they go into earth and ponds, which a packed rock bottom. There are all kinds of grasses and moss.
I’m a big fly fisherman. In the fly fishing world, hatches come off in the evening all bugs. It’s amazing to see that in our ponds. It takes about fourteen months. We take care of these fish for fourteen months. We process the fish. We have a little facility right down the road from our farm. From there, it gets shipped all over.
This is the regenerative way in which to raise these fish. This doesn’t mean it’s easy. I saw a post of yours on Instagram where there was some tragedy and you lost a lot of fish. What happened?
That was last summer. We had a pipe move. This was at a different facility down the road that we were trying out. It’s one of those things. As an animal, they’re able to breathe air at all times, even if they don’t have something to drink or eat. With a fish, the dissolved oxygen in the water is their air. If there’s an issue with that, the fish aren’t going to make it.
It’s been a major learning curve, but we’re committed to being able to stand behind a product that I personally have taken care of for fourteen months, and it gets served on a plate at a restaurant or somebody orders one of our trout boxes. From a fish at a grocery store, how many places can you say I can go visit the address and see the fish alive in the water?
I can’t even count them on one hand.
Our address is on our website. For me and my kids, it’s amazing to be like, “I don’t have to guess about where my seafood is coming from. Is there mercury in it? Are there plastics in it? Did eight dolphins have to die?” I can go and see the fish. I know what I’m getting. I know their lifecycle. I get to be a part of a seafood that I can truly stand behind.
I’m assuming, but I have to ask. You don’t give your fish antibiotics or any dyes.
No, we don’t do any of that. We don’t need to. It’s grass-based agriculture. That was our background. We’re grass-fed, Wagyu beef and pasture pork. If you do things right from the start, you’re going to be on the preventative side, not the allopathic treat symptom side. I did a video on this. We’ll have a spring flood once or twice a year. It kicks up a bunch of silt. That’ll irritate the fish’s gills. They may have some gill issues.
We put salt in the water, and it decreases inflammation in their gills. If they do have something internal that’s going on, we soak the feed in iodine and feed that to the fish. Like any other medicine, you can go to Walgreens every five minutes and get all doped up, or you can try a more holistic, natural approach. It’s been amazing to take the mindsets that we learned while doing our other farming operations. These are different skills but the same mindset in the aquaculture space.
As a consumer, how can I make more sustainable choices? You were talking earlier about how the big operations will discard the head and the bones. How can I learn to eat the whole fish? My mom didn’t teach me that.
My mom didn’t teach me either. She did teach me many things. Thank you, Mom. There’s this amazing farm in Greece. I forget the name. It’s these beautiful branzinos that are in these estuaries and it’s this amazing system. The whole fish is going to show you with your eyes. This fish lived a good life. It looks intact. The fins are intact, the eyes are clear, and the nose isn’t rubbed off. That’s a big one. We only do whole fish. Once you eat the fish, it’s amazing. You can do a fish stock or cook something else in it. There are many different uses. There’s so much good fat and meat around the fish collars and the head. It’s like nose to tail but a fish. I would say number one, whole fish, for sure.
I do know Sally has resources too, if not in her book Nourishing Traditions. I’ve seen her make fish stock before. I know there is a lot of goodness in there. I have another question for you. Why don’t I ever see trout on a menu? When I go to restaurants, it’s usually salmon, swordfish, or tuna.
There’s so much to unpack there. Salmon is the most heavily funded species in the whole world. I was at the Boston Seafood Show. Salmon was the first domesticated fish as far as breeding and getting the size right. Cows have been domesticated for thousands of years. Aquaculture isn’t new. As far as domesticating and inline breeding enough to get a salmon to look the same way with every generation, that’s the narrative. They’ve gotten that thing so dialed in with the salmon farms and wild-caught salmon.
In our lifetime, we will see the collapse of the wild salmon. The East Coast runs have been gone for a long time. The West Coast runs are done. In the past year, three of the biggest wild-caught salmon processing facilities in Alaska have closed because they’re gone. To still keep the champion wild caught, in a perfect world, sure, but we’re not in a perfect world. Look what happened to the American bison as a wild food. They are utterly decimated.
If I was like, “Wild bison, Hilda,” you’d be like, “Ty, is that the best decision? I understand, but is it the best decision for our environment and the longevity of us being stewards on this earth?” The answer would be no. I don’t have a big agenda. I’m just a dude that has a trout farm. I’m trying to paint a picture. All the wild-caught fish industry doesn’t want to tell you about regenerative aquaculture. They’re like, “Keep buying that wild-caught salmon. We’re going to milk every last salmon.” It’s like the Lorax.
I’m not trying to be more, but I’m trying to present the case of what’s going on. Regenerative aquaculture is a way to have a beautiful, healthy, clean product that you don’t have to wonder about. If I turned pigs out and was like, “I’m going to harvest them in a year. They’re wild-raised.” Did that thing get in a landfill? You don’t know what the thing ate or didn’t eat, but in the regenerative agriculture space, we pride ourselves on knowing how the animal lives. What was it fed? What’s going on with it? I want to see him. Why don’t we do the same thing with aquaculture? I want to see the fish in the water. That should be what we’re saying.
Regenerative aquaculture is a way to have a beautiful, healthy, clean product.
Are there salmon farms like your trout farm that are using these regenerative aquaculture techniques? That would be a nice in-between, but I haven’t heard of it.
I’m not going to answer that question unless I have been to the place. I don’t care what’s on their website. I don’t care what the pictures are. I want to go and see it. Anybody can put in. Even with fresh and frozen, there are no regulations around labels of fresh. Some can be in the grocery store as fresh and it could have been thawed out. There’s no regulatory thing around fresh or frozen.
Are you saying that that area in the grocery store where all the little fish are on ice? You think they caught them, and they were never frozen. There’s no promise that’s true.
The word fresh means not frozen. It doesn’t mean it got caught yesterday. If you, as a consumer, want to go in there and roll the dice, roll the dice. I’ve eaten, slept, and breathed this whole thing for years. Having my perspective, I’m like, “I don’t care if I eat trout forever. I want to know that I know.” That’s the way I am with bacon, pork chops, or steaks. I want to know that I know about fish.
For those of us who still enjoy fish, would you say that the benefits of the fish outweigh the mercury and microplastics that might be found in them? I’m talking about if I buy wild-caught from my local store, and I’m like, “That’s as good as I can do right now because I’m not near Ty’s fish farm that’s doing it all right,” would the benefits of the fish be better than avoiding seafood altogether? Tell me your opinion.
Microplastics
I don’t want microplastics and mercury. I got a six-year-old and I’d be like, “It may have mercury, but you’ll be fine.” That being said, Omega-3s only come from green material that the fish have consumed. We all do Omega-3s. That’s great, but that’s not naturally occurring in the fish. That’s going to be indicative of the environment based on what the fish eat. It gets nuanced to have the variable of you don’t know where the fish came from, you don’t know how fresh it is, you don’t know if it’s been frozen, and you don’t know what’s in it. I don’t know. It’s tough.
I’m not trying to turn everybody off. I’m presenting like it’s the Wild West. It’s been amazing for us. We ship nationwide. It’s been amazing to get emails and messages from people who are like, “I’ve been looking for so long for a seafood option that is transparent with what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.” In our instances, a freshwater fish is 80% water, so water quality is of utmost importance. To answer your question, I don’t know.
You know what you would do for yourself and your family, but you live at the hatchery with a trout that you’re raising yourself. You know the quality of that. The rest of us are sometimes trying to do the best we can. It’s a decision we each have to make for ourselves. You have gone far to inform us. Ty, this is important because some people say, “Some of the podcasts are scaring us.” We are putting information out, and the people decide for themselves what they’re going to do with it.
This is not to scare anybody. There are a bunch of regenerative aquaculture farms out there. You order your meat from Polyface or White Oak Pastures. You can order trout from us. You can order fish that is raised correctly. It’s out there.
I want to back up as we prepare to close. I want you to tell us what got you into this in the first place. You said you didn’t know anything about fish before you guys got the hatchery. What’s your personal background?
Smoke In Chimneys
It was like a total god thing. It’s my grandparents’ farm. That’s where our name comes from. We’re doing grass-fed Wagyu beef and pasture pork. My wife has a raw milk herd share. Before that, we were farming in Oregon. This opportunity came up with this trout hatchery. We were at a place where we felt like this was for us.
It was a major leap of faith. It took two years to get the place off the ground. We’re the only trout processor in the state of Virginia, which is insane to even say. That took a year of going back and forth with the regulations and being able to process the fish. It’s been a major journey. This is our third year in with a product to market. It’s been a ride.
On the most difficult days, what keeps you going?
I’m deep into this thing with our time, energy, and resources. We got to keep going. Where is it going to end up? I don’t know. We started carbonating our spring water. We’re working on doing a tin fish. It is huge now. It’s a tin trout. I got a bunch of cool products. To be able to work with Dan Barber is amazing. We’re sending brook trout up there and places up and down the East Coast. It’s been amazing to see the response from people who see the value of regenerative aquaculture systems and how that we believe is the future.
I want to pose to you the question I love to pose at the end of the program. This is health-related, not necessarily fish-related. If the audience could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?
I’ve been on gaps. We’ve done all the stuff, and it’s all amazing. Managing stress and getting rid of stress is something to hang your hat on. Beyond the food, it’s the lifestyle of inner peace. That attributes more than we think to the longevity of a person’s life.
Beyond the food, it’s the lifestyle of having an inner peace that contributes more to the longevity of a person’s life.
It’s the longevity and probably the health span. In other words, not living a long time, but living a healthy life your whole life. That’s amazing. Ty, thank you for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure.
Thanks, Hilda.
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Our guest was Ty Walker. Visit his website, Smoke in Chimneys, to learn more. I am Hilda Labrada Gore, the host and producer of this show for the Weston A. Price Foundation. You can find me at Holistic Hilda. Now for a recent letter to the editor from our spring 2024 Wise Traditions Journal. Thank you from Western Australia. “It’s a hot summer morning on the outskirts of Perth when I check my bushfire app. It’s unnecessary evil when your state has constant bushfires for about five months of the year. I jump in my car with my Esky Cooler full of ice and head out for a long drive to my local farmer, where I can get delicious raw milk and cream. I’m okay with that. Thank you, Weston A. Price Foundation and Natasha Campbell McBride.”
“Here in Perth, the number of WAPF members is probably less than 100. On your show, Hilda’s voice encourages me as I get further out of the city. Side note, I’m happy to hear this. Raw cow’s milk is illegal here, not just in Western Australia, but the whole country, but I don’t care. I have faith in the Weston A. Price Foundation and the GAP diet. They didn’t poison me with amalgams, root canals, toxic food, and water. My list of health problems is long, like many others in modern society.”
“As with many of us who discover WAPF, my husband is not entirely on board. When people don’t understand or judge me, or even get angry at me, I am reminded of how Weston Price lost his son, that sometimes learning can stem from a painful or scary experience, and learning is valuable and can change our lives in ways we could have never imagined.”
“One day, my husband said something to the effect of, ‘People don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s crazy talk. They don’t have time for this stuff.’ I remember my response vividly. That’s because they’re not sick enough yet. Sadly, I believe that. I try to believe that little things matter and tell people around me what I know if they’re open to hearing it. I try to keep Hilda’s motto in mind, to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun. A big thank you to everyone involved with the WAPF,” name withheld.
This warms my heart to know that people on the other side of the planet are listening to these words, feeling and finding encouragement. That is our mission here at the Weston A. Price Foundation, education, research, and activism. We do it for you. We join hands with you on your journey. Thank you so much for tuning in, my friend. Stay well and do remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.
About Ty Walker
Ty Walker and his wife Shannon own Smoke In Chimneys, a revitalized 1930s trout hatchery right outside the Washington/Jefferson National Forest in southwestern Virginia. They are raising trout for table fare and sending it to restaurants and retailers around the Mid Atlantic region.
Episode Links:
Ty Walker – LinkedIn
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