The food bank pulled a huge road from 13,000 fresh salmon. The catch? The fish were still alive – Fremont Tribune

Auburn, NY – New York Food Bank was offered a huge donation to fresh fish – but it came with a catch.

Localcoho, soon a close -up salmon farm in the small town of Pran, wanted to give 40,000 pounds of the Central New York Food Bank, a mother who has high quality protein that can feed thousands of families.

But the fish was still alive and floating in the giant reservoirs of the closet farm. Organizations will have to figure out how to get about 13,000 salmon from the water and then process them into frozen fillets for distribution in regional food closets.

They will have to do it quickly before the business is closed forever. Localcoho had to end the operations on Friday.

Thanks to dozens of volunteers from the food closet wishing to help employees burn the salmon, the team managed to empty the tanks after a few weeks and a cold pack of tons of fish to send to a processor.

“The fact that we had only weeks to do this really increased the intensity and anxiety a little,” said Brian McManus, Chief Operations Officer of the Food Bank. “I knew we had the will. I knew we had the expert experience.”

Dealing with food waste has been a discouraging challenge for years in both the United States and around the world. More than one -third of the food produced in the US is never eaten and much of it ends up on landfills.

Recently, workers have gone through deep knee water, charging with salmon to fill their nets. Christina Hudson Koler was one of the volunteers who put waterproof overalls and gloves to grab the fish loaded and empty their contents in cold storage containers.

“It’s a little different,” Koler said during a vacation. “In the past, my volunteer work with the food bank has sorted carrots or peppers or sucked in the field.”

Localcoho, who was a pilot for potential other farms in the United States, used avant -garde aquacultural practices for growing coho salmon from eggs to the size of the market in massive pools using recirculated water. It supplies Coho Salmon to wholesalers and retailers, including high -end restaurants Manhattan Sushi, in order to build regional farms across the country.

Coho is desirable for its cleaner taste and better feeling in the mouth than the more common Atlantic salmon.

Finger Lakes Fish, under the Localcoho brand, initially sold its salmon to local wineries several fish at once. He then began to distribute the Fulton Fish Market cooperative in New York, where he went to some of the best sushi restaurants in the city. In Chicago, customers included a United Airlines salon at O’Hare International Airport, Soldier Field and Field’s White Sox House.

“I will do it on my own horn,” said manager Adam Kramartic. “It was a really great product.”

But Kramarcik told citizens that he was not growing fast enough to become sustainable. He described the farm as “a really expensive project for research and development.”

Although expanded, assisted by a $ 500,000 state grant and a large investment by an aquaculture fund, it should continue to expand to the extent that it can produce 1200 tonnes of fish a year to break even. He has reached 200 tonnes, he said, just reaching his average goal for the weight of fish with his most harvest.

Company employees have decided last year to end things at the end of this January, Khamarcik said.

He said they did not want the fish to waste or find themselves like biofuel. Then they reached out to see if the fish could be donated as food.

“This is” lemonade of lemons, “I guess it’s the phrase,” Khamarcik said.

Localcoho could process about 600 fish a week by hand, but there were less than a month to clear the tanks many times this number of fish.

McManus was excited about the proposal to land so many fish – and nervous about the challenge. While Syracuse -based operation knew how to spread canned or frozen seafood, it was not designed to deal with fresh fish. How can it turn thousands of fish into frozen fillets within a narrow period?

Khamarcik said it takes “tones and tons of logistics”.

The food bank joined 42 volunteers to help. Local business with refrigerated trucks, Brown Carbonic, offered to deliver the fish for free to a processor per hour in Rochester. And Localcoho employees got involved to do the job on time.

“Many companies that go out of work would just be,” Get what you can get, we will do the best we can. ” I want to say they work extremely hard, “said Andrew Katzer, director of the public procurement bank.

Salmon is processed and quickly freezes. It will be distributed soon among 243 food closets, as well as kitchens for soups, shelters and other institutions on the Food Bank network. Some fish will also go to the onanda and cabin nations, and volunteers will also take some at home.

All that said, the catch is expected to give more than 26,000 servings of a difficult source of protein for the hungry.

“Protein, animal protein is very, very desirable,” McManus said. “We know that people need this to feed and it is difficult to get. So this will make a very big impact.”