TERRAFORMING TERRA
We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.
Wednesday, April 26, 2017
Native Americans caught salmon here for millennia. Now the world is hooked.
This is hopeful and good to see. The Pacific coast fishery has been poorly managed for decades although we have seen steady improvement over the past thirty years. Recently science has discovered how to chase sea lice out of farmed fish pens. All this puts the thirty year development of farmed salmon on a sound footing.
This allows the wild fishery to be continuously upgraded without reflecting abnormal market pressures. That way the wild catch can simply be sold as a premium product against a stable farmed supply.
Add in the apparent discovery that iron fertilization triggered a giant Fraser river sockeye return recently and we have a serious clue on how to sustain a flood of riverine fish returns to deal with every year.
All we need to do now is sustainably recover all the river systems as well as possible in order to maximize spawning. again adding in additional fry releases is also possible sine we have also mastered the art of doing all that.
Obviously the industry has the potential to employ hundreds of thousands along the Pacific Northwest Coast at a scale far larger than originally...
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Native Americans caught salmon here for millennia. Now the world is hooked.
Out in the middle of nowhere, people look out for one
another. That fact is especially evident in the boonies of southern
Washington as you cut east along the Columbia River in the company of
“Sockeye” Suzy Lumley. If you come across her, don’t be surprised if she
hands you some canned salmon. She gives fish out by the pallet, as I learned one February
afternoon, when Lumley and I drove the two-lane highway that winds along
the Columbia’s banks. We flew by open country and rolling hills, then
passed a small group of Yakama Native American women on the roadside.
When Lumley, who is also Yakama, saw their colorful dresses billowing in
the wind, she slammed on the brakes and spun around her red Dodge Ram.
After exchanging a few words with the women, Lumley — who is tiny, just
4-foot 10-inches tall — climbed into the Ram’s bed and handed off a
square flat of fish.
Lumley has enough to share. She runs a small business canning and
selling Columbia River sockeye and other species. Poverty is vicious and
familiar, especially for the Yakama, Umatilla, Warm Springs, and Nez
Perce Nations, the primary tribes that live out here. At the end of a
long winter, especially, every can of fish helps.
Northwestern Native Americans have caught salmon from the Columbia
River for thousands of years. Nowadays, for nine months out of the year,
tribal fishermen leave their reservations and relocate to trailer camps
that pop up every few miles along a roughly 150-mile stretch of
riverbank.
Bookended by two dams, these grounds form part of the border between
Oregon and Washington State. For decades, Native fishermen got little
more from the river’s bounty beyond their own subsistence. Seafood
buyers offered meager prices to Natives because the methods commonly
used to handle and store catches (basically, tossing fish in the stern
of a boat or back of a pickup truck) weren’t up to commercial standards.
That’s changed over the past 10 years, thanks to the efforts of
Lumley and others; now prices for Columbia River salmon have roughly
quadrupled, and you’ll find it on the menu at Michelin-star restaurants
across the country.
The higher prices paid for the Native catch have rippling economic
benefits for indigenous communities. More members of tribes — younger
ones, too — are heading to the river. Small businesses, like Lumley’s,
can now afford to hire new employees off the reservation and build
sorely needed infrastructure. And with the aid of a government-funded
program that brings Native American foods to a global audience — a
distribution avenue that could be endangered by Trump administration
budget cuts — Lumley is dreaming big about an expanded Columbia River
fishery that lifts all boats.
Building a better fishery
“You can hold your hand in ice water, and it’s cold,” JoLena
Castilleja says as we crunch along the gravelly banks of the Columbia.
Wearing a knit cap and hunting jacket, she mimes placing a fish into an
icy slurry.
Castilleja, 36, is Lumley’s oldest daughter, and she fishes alongside
her brother, sister-in-law, three cousins, and stepfather in the family
business.
When you add salt to ice water, the slurry’s temperature plummets,
Castilleja explains. “There’s no holding your hand in,” she says,
laughing.
Today, on the banks of the Columbia, freshly caught salmon is
immediately knocked over the head, bled from the gills, and then plunged
into coolers of iced salt water. The blood-draining and extreme cold
are crucial to high-quality meat—keeping it firm and extending the
catch’s shelf life by a week or two. Castilleja and many other Native
American fishermen learned the technique in free food-handling classes
offered through the nonprofit Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish
Commission.
Roger Dick, a fisheries biologist and member of the Yakama Nation,
who grew up in a fishing family, tells me that prices were much lower in
the 1990s and early 2000s, before the kind of coolers that Castilleja
describes caught on. The Yakama’s busiest salmon season, from August to
October, once netted between $1 million and $2 million, Dick says.
Today, it’s worth up to $6 million.
The new wealth is critical to Yakama fishermen, who typically survive
the winter on the reservation, an hour or so north of the Columbia,
depleting their savings until fishing starts up again in spring.
People like Lumley are reinvesting the increased revenue from salmon
fishing back into the community. She sources her fish from members of
all four tribes. And for the past 10 seasons, she has hired and housed
at least half a dozen Yakama teens on the Columbia — expanding her
business and keeping the youth out of trouble.
“It turned around some of these kids,” says Eric Stanford, a fish buyer who has known Lumley for a dozen years. Francois de Melogue / Foods in Season The higher prices are drawing more fishermen to the river and
improving life back on the reservation. Families now have more income to
keep the lights on through the winter off-season, to buy their kids
school clothes, and to invest in newer, better fishing gear, Dick says.
Of course, the fishing is both seasonal and cyclical — dependent on
when salmon runs take place in the tribes’ section of the river, as well
as how many fish happen to show up. But while there’s some concern
about scarcity year-to-year, overfishing isn’t a problem, according to
Dick. State, federal, and tribal officials negotiate strictly-enforced
limits on the number of fish that Native Americans can catch every
season — and quotas can be adjusted in the future to ensure salmon keep
coming back.
Although ice has made Native-caught fish more competitive, it’s a
scarce resource on the Columbia. Lumley typically buys ice in 10-pound
bags from a little store near her camp. When the shop runs out — which
it often does — she has to drive at least 40 minutes, one way, to stock
up.
There is a single ice machine on the entire stretch of river, and it
whirs away inside an otherwise empty warehouse an hour’s drive from
Lumley’s camp. The building went up more than a decade ago, and was
initially conceived as a fish-processing and smoking plant for the four
tribes to share. But instead, according to Lumley, the groups are now
bickering over financing and control of the project. So Lumley is taking matters into her own hands. She plans to install a
second ice machine near her family’s fishing camp. And she intends to
fulfill the promise of building a processing plant on the river — a
co-op that fishing crews from the four tribes can all use. Today, Lumley
has to drive four hours into Oregon to have her catch smoked and
processed. In 2015, one of the plants she worked with may have
under-processed her fish, leading to a botulism scare and voluntary recall.
Cutting out the middleman would give her more quality control in the
future. It could also net dramatically better prices — on the order of
five times higher for a single fish, she estimates.
Her plan to get around the quarreling that led to the processing
plant sitting almost empty? Demonstrate that unity is a common interest.
As Lumley draws in more business, she plans to buy from more local
fishermen and pay them progressively higher prices. Once everyone sees
that their wages are rising, she explains, she is certain Native
American fishermen will come together.
“It’s a way to get the prices up for the rest of the Natives,” Lumley says. “That’s my main goal.”
Going global, boosting local
Wild fish taste better than farmed, and the Columbia’s salmon have
become some of the most coveted in restaurant kitchens from Seattle to
New York City. As the Native fishery has taken off, the origin of the
catch has been a valuable sales tool.
“Sometimes that story is a little marketing piece you’re able to use
to help sell that extra fish or two,” says Johnny Anderson, vice
president of a seafood distributor called Foods in Season.
Grist Now the Columbia River brand is going global. A few times a year,
Lumley jets from the Northwest to far-flung locales like Boston or Hong
Kong, where she networks at trade shows. A bumper crop of small
businesses and tribal cooperatives is breaking into new markets under
the umbrella of American Indian Foods, a program administered by the
nonprofit Intertribal Agriculture Council and partially funded by the
U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The trade association— which began in 1998 to promote indigenous
cultures through food — has assisted 40 tribes across the lower 48 and
Alaska. Samples of Lumley’s canned smoked salmon and fresh fillets, as
well as crab from Alaska, wine and olive oil from California, and wild
rice from Minnesota, feature prominently at these events.
To join American Indian Foods, a business has to be 51 percent
Native-owned and agree to bear a small, purple certification stamp on
its products. In the last decade, members’ international sales have
surged from fewer than a million dollars per year up to $20 million,
according to an estimate from program director Nathan Notah.
With global access, operations can scale up quickly. Native
American–owned businesses can afford to hire more of their own people,
support youth and social programs, and reinvest in their tribes. President Trump’s new budget proposal, though, would cut almost $5 billion dollars from the USDA. The program’s 20-year momentum could grind to a halt, torpedoing the fortunes of burgeoning Native American small businesses.
“There’s fear,” Notah says. “We don’t know what’s going to happen.”
(In a later conversation, Notah clarified that he was talking about
Native Americans’ concern over how programs that support them, including
education and health care, would fare under the Trump administration —
not the one he administers specifically.)
Without American Indian Foods, Lumley’s business would likely
survive, but her dreams of a benevolent empire along the Columbia would
take a blow. Since September, Lumley has met seven potential buyers at
trade shows but hasn’t closed any deals. Some of her new contacts are
planning to visit the river to get a better sense of her operation — and
Lumley hopes they’ll then commit to her as a supplier.
She wants international clients to pay a premium for her fish, which
she’ll source from the Yakama, Umatilla, Warm Springs, and Nez Perce
Nations — creating the stronger, united, communal fishery of her dreams. \ “I’m not just promoting my product; I’m promoting the four tribes on the Columbia,” she says. “I represent everybody.”
about the cut from the USDA budget. No details were provided, but given the success of this project, and how small the amount that goes from the USDA to this project, I would think that the impact would be minimal.
Hard to know, since no relevant figures were provided. And if the USDA has no financial interest in you, than you are likely to have more freedom to act as you see fit.
1 comment:
about the cut from the USDA budget. No details were provided, but given the success of this project, and how small the amount that goes from the USDA to this project, I would think that the impact would be minimal.
Hard to know, since no relevant figures were provided. And if the USDA has no financial interest in you, than you are likely to have more freedom to act as you see fit.
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