Geothermal Farm

Geothermal Farm

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
Leo Ray, company’s Fish Breeders of Idaho. And we're here at the Catfish Farm. I'm originally from Oklahoma and went to college at the University of Oklahoma, and one of the professors got a grant to study the feasibility of catfish farming. And I got a job working on that project and have spent the rest of my life raising fish and mainly catfish centered around catfish. I moved to Idaho in 1971 because of the hot water and bought this place and developed it into a catfish farm, I've been running it ever since. When I bought this place, a comment that was made was, What did Leo want with that old rock pile? The water is even too hot to drink. And now hot water sells for several times more than cold water. There's so many things you can do with it. You can grow a lot more species of fish and you can heat buildings with it, do everything, and then still have it left over for irrigating after we get through with it. We had to drill wells and the wells are only about 500 feet deep and it's artesian. So here we raise the catfish on it. A catfish needs water between 80 and 85 degrees. Tilapia the same way. Tilapia will die if the water gets below 60 degrees. Catfish just quit feeding and won't won't grow. So all the warm water species, the fish can be raised on it, where with the cold water, trout and sturgeon and the old thing, we're growing . There's just so many things you can do with that temperature. My wells here come out between 90 and 95, but three miles away from me, there's a well that is 160 degrees. And it's how close you are to the fault line where that water's coming up from. (David So you measured geothermal water with with cold water.) Yeah. We don't need a lot of mixing, but a little bit to try to get it down closer to 85 degrees. And the environmental temperature will take some of that heat out of it.
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