Marysville farmers turn to tilapia to diversify product

Some farmers get by growing row crops like soybeans and corn. Others make their way raising cattle, hogs and poultry. Some grow hay and grain.

The Bayes family in Marysville used to be like other farmers, and in a lot of ways, it still is. Jeff Bayes oversees 300 acres of soybeans and corn, and 300 acres of hay each growing season. But year-round in a building that used to house pigs, churning tanks filled with hundreds of gallons of water serve as the pens for thousands of tilapia, with about 300 pounds of the fish sent live to market each week.

“We went and toured some farms in Illinois before we went into this and found out that tilapia was about the fastest-growing fish in popularity out there, and they were very, very hard to kill,” Bayes said. “We thought with those two things, that might be something in our favor. So that’s why we decided to go with tilapia.”

Native to the Middle East and parts of Northern Africa, the Tilapia has gained popularity in recent years among seafood lovers and foodies in general. The freshwater fish is hardy and survivable in warm climates, and the lack of a fishy taste to its meat makes it a more accessible dish to those with picky palettes.

What used to be a hog building on a farm owned by Duane Bayes, Jeff Bayes’ father, houses three large finishing tanks in what used to serve as the building’s manure tanks. The tanks have been modified, lined in rubber and extending a few feet upward from the floor. Hoses containing water heated by a wood-burning stove outside run through the tanks to keep the water at the right temperature, while motors housed in the middle of the building keep the water in the tanks well-oxygenated and filtrated.

Every few months, about 4,000 fry — or babies — are shipped in from a supplier in New Mexico and kept in a five-foot-tall drum. When they’re large enough, the fry are moved into two adjacent tanks. When they’re big enough and there’s room in the finishing tanks, they move on.

“We have found it’s not worth our time for the expense and everything to mess with any breeding stock or anything like that,” Jeff Bayes said.

All told, about 20,000 fish of varying ages and sizes are under the roof, and the Bayes plan to expand the building to accommodate another finishing tank and an expanded nursery for the babies.

“It’s unbelievable. We can’t keep up with the demand,” Jeff Bayes said. “That’s why we’re trying to expand, because there are more people wanting fish than we can supply.”

It all started about 3 1/2 years ago. Jeff Bayes got the idea from a soybean digest, and the rest of the family was on board. It took some convincing to get the bank to help out with financing the equipment, along with a lot of trial and error in getting things running smoothly. The first batch of babies reached maturity in tanks at New Washington High School, but since then, the nursery has been tended to in-house.

Rodney Bayes, Jeff’s brother, was the mastermind behind getting the building ready to house a fishery. The building needed to be completely rewired to house the motors that run the filtration and oxygenation systems. The fish rely on those to survive, so a kerosene generator to protect against outages was a must. The building’s roof was in need of repair after years of disuse, and then, of course, there were the tanks.

In addition to expanding the operation, the Bayes are examining ways to cut costs by installing equipment to take advantage of renewable sources of energy like solar and wind. The family uses a nearby pond to finish a group of fish in cages each summer, where the tilapia thrive at a lower operating cost. The water from the tanks runs is partially filtered by an adjacent water garden.

When the garden was first introduced, the Bayes tried using plants like lettuce to filter the water, but as the water became more rich with nutrients, the plants’ roots couldn’t handle the fine particulates. In search of a solution, Bayes’ employee Mike Hawkins discovered a solution in an unlikely form — duckweed.