The river as industry

Dixie Best cleans a trout pen at Clear Springs Foods near Buhl, Idaho. The company is the largest producer of trout for human consumption in the nation, using cold water from the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer to grow roughly 25 million harvestable trout a year.

For a trout farm, the source is priceless

Outside the oasis of Boise, we roll southeast into desert.

The mercury tops 100 again. Dusty gullies flash by at 75 mph. On the north and south horizons, mountain ranges pinch the edges of a big sky.

The Snake River runs parallel to Interstate 84, out of sight in an ancient canyon 400 feet deep in places. Along its banks is a wildlife reserve harboring a larger concentration of birds of prey than any other place on the continent.

Near Glenns Ferry, perhaps as many as 300,000 Oregon Trail emigrants crossed the roiling Snake on their way to the promised land of the Willamette Valley.

For all the trials of their journey, they were rewarded with one of the region's great sights - Shoshone Falls, the "Niagara of the West," which plunges 212 feet into the Snake canyon and flows into the glowing golden orb of the setting sun beyond.

By 1906, immigrants who remained in Central Idaho had transformed it from sagebrush to lush farmland with an impressive irrigation system. It still is called the Magic Valley.

But irrigation did something unsightly - it drained the landmark falls.

To settlers who watched the first diversion, "irrigators' ability to shut off the falls had superseded the falls itself as an example of sublime power," wrote Mark Fiege in an essay on the "hybrid landscape" of Idaho.

Ironically, just downstream of where the river virtually goes dry, an entrepreneur named Ted Eastman worked a bit of his own magic in 1966.

He captured the natural spring waters of the underground river that gush from the walls of the Snake Canyon and he started what would become the world's largest trout farm.

BUHL, Idaho - At a knoll on the south side of the Snake, the modest headquarters of Clear Springs Foods overlooks the rugged canyon. From there, it's not possible to see what makes this spot like nowhere else in the world.

Tim Hanifen, vice president of operations for Clear Springs, tells the story succinctly: "Our water source is why we are here."

He's not talking about the Snake River.

In the Pioneer Mountains of Central Idaho - not far from the ski resort town of Sun Valley - the deep snowpack melts each spring and seeps into the porous volcanic rock below. The water filters down and pools underground in what amounts to a huge reservoir, the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer.

"You might envision it as a huge bathtub full of rocks," explained Hanifen. "And our area here is where the outlet is."

The water courses from the Snake canyon walls at the rate of more than 1 million gallons a minute along a 20-mile stretch. It is cold - 58 degrees year-round - and filled with oxygen.

"We know of no other like source in the U.S. in terms of volume, consistency and temperature," said Hanifen, a former Connell-based employee of Lamb-Weston.

"That is not only why we are here, but it is also a barrier to growth anywhere else. ... You don't start a trout company anywhere else with the kind of magnitude we have because the water sources are not available like this."

Though few consumers could name any of the valley's trout farms, 70 percent of the nation's trout that are grown for human consumption are raised here.

Hanifen's approach to trout is practical, a stark change from the semispiritual tone that often infuses salmon discussions. To him, trout are "animals" with "carcass traits" that are important on the table.

The history of trout cultivation in the Magic Valley goes back about 80 years.

In the 1920s, a former Utah Fish and Game employee named Jack Tingey figured out all the cold water flowing from the canyon was good for something besides rotation crops. He built raceways and started growing rainbow trout, feeding them ground-up farm animal carcasses.

"This was really an infant business at that time," said Hanifen, surrounded by wall-mounted glossy photos of the modern "food product" his company mass produces.

Tingey's production manager in the 1940s was Ted Eastman, who in 1966 decided to build his own trout farm. Eastman planned to sell his fish for processing to the new owners of Tingey's company.

Eastman's production quickly outpaced the capacity that Tingey's old plant could process, so he built his own small processing plant.

Since then, Clear Springs has grown 50 times larger, far outstripping other valley trout farms. Today, it's the largest producer of rainbow trout in the nation with annual sales topping $30 million.

That equates to roughly 25 million harvestable and homogenous trout a year. Each is about 1 foot long,

1 pound and 1 year old.

"All we are is a feedlot, but our animals live in the water," Hanifen said.

As far as environmental concerns, Clear Springs is in good shape as long as it keeps its discharge water pollution-free - which is no simple task with millions of defecating fish to clean up after.

It takes constant attention by vacuum-wielding employees to keep the ponds from clogging with scum and eventually polluting the river.

And the company is watching another suspect herd - the 200,000 or so dairy cows in the Magic Valley that tread the porous lava beds just "upstream" from the springs.

Large algae blooms through the middle Snake River indicate that large amounts of nutrients are seeping into the river, something that has not gone unnoticed in Southern Idaho. A recent article in the Twin Falls Times-News linked the region's growing number of cows to potential water contamination.

"Anything you have got sitting above (the aquifer) is always of concern," Hanifen said.

But of more concern to Clear Springs than river conditions is the diminishing aquifer. The underground supply has dwindled by about one-fourth in the last 50 years because of consecutive drought years, withdrawals and less recharge from irrigation canals leaking water back into the ground.

In addition to the valley's trout farms, a handful of cities and large irrigation districts also tap the underground lake. The aquifer is so large - spanning hundreds of square miles under Eastern Idaho - that the decrease in water quantity has yet to significantly affect Clear Springs operations.

It's the old story of the West: Everyone wants more water than there is.

Clear Springs essentially borrows water from this ecosystem high in the canyon and dumps it back into the river lower down. The flow is important to the Snake because it recharges the warm trickle that remains in the river after irrigation diversions.

Gravity does most of the work. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a second roar downhill through the stepped pools. The flow captures oxygen needed by the fish as it spills from one level to the next.

Clear Springs Foods has rights to 949 cubic feet per second - roughly twice as much as flows down the Yakima River in late summer.

In between inlets and outlets at Clear Springs' four facilities are hundreds of symmetrical gray pens covered in chicken wire to keep out herons. Fish start at the top level, the most pristine water, and move down the "stream" sections in 4-foot drops as they grow.

When they get to their fourth raceway, the trout are harvested - nearly 98,000 a day - and sent to the processing plant. Processing starts within an hour of the fish being pulled from the ponds. They are gutted by machine and then weighed, sorted and chilled on computerized lines.

The heavily tapped underground reservoir makes Clear Springs dependent on technical innovations to increase efficiency.

Improvements in feeding technology, for instance, have allowed Clear Springs to decrease the time from egg to market size from 2.5 years to about 1 year.

PVC tubes containing a patented feeding device criss-cross the pens. Clear Springs makes a pelletized feed from anchovies, herring, soybeans, wheat, poultry, vitamins and minerals - a substantially more sophisticated product than Tingey's ground-up farm animals. Nutrients in the feed are constantly being evaluated to grow tastier fish faster.

Also, genetic researchers select fast-growing, disease-resistant trout stocks to breed. All the fish in all the pens are female. That's because females have superior "carcass traits." In other words, they are more economical and look better on the plate.

"Unfortunately," quipped Hanifen, "We don't need men."

He explains why: The all-female populations are the product of normal female trout and "neomales."

Neomales - genetic females with male bodies that produce sperm - are produced by altering the development of normal females by giving them a synthetic male steroid early in life.

Their offspring, never exposed to steroids or genetic engineering, are all female.

About two-thirds of Clear Springs' fish are sold fresh and the rest are frozen. Many are hauled to Denny's, Red Lobster and other restaurants around the country by a fleet of trucks.

Others are sold in grocery store fish cases - without consumers ever suspecting their Idaho trout came from a pen in a giant farm nourished by an invisible river.