Northern California Sturgeon Farms

Northern California Sturgeon Farms

Tim Hammerich
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
This is Tim Hammerich with California Ag Today.

If you’ve ever had sturgeon, there’s a good chance it came from a Northern California sturgeon farm. A conservation success story, sturgeon farming has been commercialized thanks to conservation work started at UC Davis decades ago. Cooperative Extension Aquaculture Specialist Dr. Jackson Gross explains.

Gross..”Sturgeon started off as a conservation story for California, our Sacramento sturgeon or Sacramento white sturgeon over 30 years ago, they started working at white sturgeon conservation here. Part of that was the aquaculture, the role of aquaculture, conservation aquaculture, People understood that sturgeon, in terms of caviar, could also be of a high quality, which also could provide food as well as income to an industry. Um, and that, that started, uh, to what we have today is a sustainable sturgeon industry in the greater Sacramento area.”

Sturgeon are raised both for their meat as well as for caviar. Some farms are also experimenting with integ rating them into aquaponics systems. But before you rush out to start your sturgeon farm, you should know it takes about seven years to raise a sturgeon for caviar. Also, they get really big.

Gross…”Well, I'm six (foot) four, and I've been knocked down by some of these fish. So they'll be as big as me, and probably outweighed me by a hundred pounds.”

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