Jan. 29, 2014 11:11 p.m. ET
The infestation of Asian Carp in the Mississippi River has become a big problem. But some entrepreneurs have figured out a solution: export them back to Asia. WSJ’s Arian Campo-Flores reports. Photo:Joe Buglewicz for The Wall Street Journal.
WICKLIFFE, Ky.—In the battle to contain the spread of invasive Asian carp that have infested waterways throughout the South and Midwest, experts have floated elaborate proposals, from building electric barriers to unleashing poisonous microparticles.
Angie Yu has a simpler solution: export them back to Asia. Unlike Americans, who often consider carp too bony, people there fancy the fish.
Last year, the 58-year-old Chinese-American businesswoman opened Two Rivers Fisheries in this small town near the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. So far, she says she has shipped a half-million pounds of frozen Asian carp to China. There, carp is generally farmed and tastes like mud, Ms. Yu says.
She hawks her product as “Kentucky white fish” that is “wild-caught.” A promotional video she created in Chinese, featuring a folksy soundtrack, touts the fish’s origins in the “beautiful and bountiful Mississippi…the nourishing mother river of America.” The moniker she chose has another benefit: “Kentucky Fried Chicken is popular in China,” she says.
A load of frozen Asian carp at Two Rivers Fisheries in Wickliffe, Ky. The company ships the fish to China. Joe Buglewicz for The Wall Street Journal
Ms. Yu is one of many entrepreneurs angling to profit off the war on carp. Schafer Fisheries in Thomson, Ill., ships it frozen to 16 countries and also turns it into kosher hot dogs, salami and gefilte fish, says owner Mike Schafer.
American Heartland Fish Products is about to unveil a plant in Grafton, Ill., that can process 60,000 pounds of carp a day. A massive machine grinds up the catch, blasts the resulting goop with a 700-degree torrent of air and runs the remnants through a press. The end products: fish oil, used to make dietary supplements, and fish meal, used to make animal feed, says chief executive Gray Magee.
Asian carp, which can grow as large as 100 pounds, were first brought to the American South from Asia in the 1970s to help clean wastewater ponds. But flooding allowed them to escape into river systems, where they proliferated. They gradually migrated north and are now nearing the Great Lakes, though there is no evidence they have established themselves there, says James Garvey, vice chancellor for research at Southern Illinois University.
The fish are such voracious eaters that they have crowded out other species and disrupted ecosystems. One variety, silver carp, also have a tendency to startle at the sound of boat motors, prompting them to leap out of the water and sometimes whack people in the head.
Though the fish is popular in China, cracking the market is tough. Transportation costs are high. Consumers are accustomed to buying fresh, not frozen, fish. “They keep telling me, ‘Your fish is dead,’ ” says Richard Yang of Big River Fish Corporation in Griggsville, Ill., which exports carp to China and elsewhere. Also, Chinese people like to buy a medium-size whole fish they can eat in one meal, he says, “but ours is like a monster.”
Big River Fish has made inroads by promoting the fish as clean and healthy to more-affluent consumers, Mr. Yang says. A big seller is carp heads, which Chinese people eat steamed with soy sauce, ginger and hot chili peppers. “People go crazy over the head,” he says. It “has a lot of edible stuff inside.”
One recent afternoon, fisherman Byron Mann backed a pickup truck with a fresh catch into Ms. Yu’s plant, where one wall is adorned with a painting of smiling Chinese kids carrying an enormous orange carp. Workers loaded the squirming fish onto a metal table to gut and wash them, then wheeled them off to a freezer.
Mr. Mann is no fan of Asian carp. “It has just about ruined the buffalo fish industry in the Mississippi,” he says. He has gotten walloped by some jumpers. “I’ve had black eyes, and one almost broke my nose,” he says.
So when he heard he could help send them overseas while also making a buck, he was hooked. If demand becomes consistent, “I could make a dent” in their population, Mr. Mann says.
Ms. Yu got the idea to open the plant after reading an article in 2010 that described the U.S. infestation of Asian carp, which she considers delicious, as a “disaster.”
“It surprised me people saw it that way,” she says. So she moved from Los Angeles to tiny Wickliffe and, backed by a package of grants and incentives from the state and county, began shipping carp in August.
Ms. Yu, who has been selling seafood to China for more than 15 years, previously had a hit with lumpfish, a North Atlantic species harvested for its roe that few in the country had heard of. When she learned Icelandic fishermen would extract the eggs and toss the rest of the fish, she sniffed opportunity.
There was just one problem: though lumpfish meat tastes good, she says, the skin is thick and hard to remove. One day, Ms. Yu tried the skin and she says she discovered it tasted like sea cucumber, a delicacy in China. That became the selling point.
As demand soared, shipments of lumpfish from Iceland to China jumped to 2,500 tons in 2012 from 75 tons in 2009, says Ormur Arnarson, managing director of Triton Ltd., the exporter Ms. Yu buys from. “It was a bit of a gold rush,” he says.
Other entrepreneurs are focusing on the U.S. market for carp. Some restaurateurs have tried to turn it into a high-end delicacy, with mixed success. Fin-International in New Orleans uses carp to make fish cakes, spiced with ingredients like peppercorns and habanero chilies, aimed at Southeast Asian communities.
Because carp has become a dirty word in some parts, the company rebranded the fish. Co-founder Lula Luu says she considered dozens of names, including “majestic silver” and “moon fish,” before settling on “American silver tolpyga,” derived in part from the fish’s Russian name. “It rolls off the tongue,” she says.
Meanwhile, Philippe Parola, a chef in Baton Rouge, is pursuing investors for a planned $10 million carp plant that would churn out Louisiana-style fish croquettes intended for hotels, casinos and cruise lines.
“There is no such thing as a bad fish,” says Mr. Parola. “Come up with a product that is in demand, and people will buy it.”
Write to Arian Campo-Flores at arian.campo-flores@wsj.com
See the rest here: Catchy Idea: To Battle Asian Carp, Send Them to Asia
