Alabama community College teaches fish farming

Courtesy of GrandViewOutdoors.com
On a sunny afternoon, 15 workers are waist deep in a half-acre pond, tromping through 46-degree water and dragging a 120-foot net to catch several hundred small fish.

The fingerling yellow perch are being pulled from the water to be part of studies of the small fish, which is being introduced as an alternate commercial species in Alabama.

The students will pull the net from one end of the pond to the other another two times before they will have retrieved all the fish needed for the studies, which focus on growth and how efficiently the animals convert food to additional body mass.

Then they'll come out of the pond, soaked from chest to feet, ready to get changed to head home or to their next class.

This is all in a day for the 31 students in the Gadsden State aquaculture program, which is training students to go on to more advanced degree in fisheries and science or directly into the state's multimillion-dollar farming and fisheries industries.

"It's a normal day of class and we're out doing stuff. It's like this every day,'' said student Mike Buckley. "Like this morning, we were in the hatchery, counting and weighing fish.''

"The program is essentially half in the classroom, and half out of the classroom with hands-on activities,'' said Hugh Hammer, program manager of GSCC's Aquaculture Education and Development Center.

The program's home base is sort of on its own, in the back section of the campus. With 13 ponds totaling about 12 surface acres of water, an indoor hatchery filled with tanks full of different fish varieties and a classroom building, it has to be.

According to Hammer, the facility is a scale model of a working aquaculture farm. "It's like a train set,'' he said, adding that while an average commercial pond is 10 acres, the GSCC ponds each are a quarter- or half-acre in size. "It's a miniature.''

The fisheries contain about 14 species in large scale, including tilapia, channel catfish, ornamental koi, yellow perch, hybrid striped bass, rainbow trout, blue gill and large-mouthed bass.

Hammer said they also grow freshwater shrimp in summer.
Hammer, who's worked to build the program up since he took the helm 10 years ago, is the department's only full-time faculty member.

Fisheries tech Timothy Adams is a part-time staff member.
"We do all our own labor out here, so pond renovations, we do our own. We do everything,'' Hammer said while walking out to the ponds. "Most everything we accomplish here, we accomplish through our students.''
Besides helping keep ponds working and maintained, students are assigned ponds and tanks inside the hatchery and are responsible for taking chemistry samples, changing filters, cleaning and retrieving and feeding fish.

And that's the way the students like it. The hands-on experience is part of what makes the program so valuable.

"I came here looking for jobs with my master's in biology, but there wasn't anything available if you're not a molecular person, so the hands-on experience is everything,'' said student Kayla Smith.

She's in her second semester at GSCC, but already has a bachelor's degree from Penn State and a master's degree in biology from Jacksonville State. "You can't find a job without it, and you get that every day here.''

Smith, who intends to become a fish biologist, said being out with the fish, every day, tying together concepts and skills, will help her job search.
Student worker Kevin Landry said he chose Gadsden State over Auburn University for the program because he thought it had more hands-on opportunities, which he said "greatly improves the learning aspects.''
"You learn it, then you get to apply it with your hands,'' he said.

Accompanying that valuable experience is a sense of accountability and accomplishment from assisting in tasks.

"We only have class on Tuesday and Thursday, but you can normally come up here and there will be another student doing some kind of work here,'' Buckley said, adding students take care of systems and monitor water chemistry on their off days. "With us doing the work, we can say 'I did that' or 'I got to help on this,''' he said.