Despite potential, Midwestern farms struggle to market fish

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — When drastic increases in food costs spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic left Andrew Caplinger struggling to find fresh catfish for his restaurants, he decided to try “an experimental” solution — growing his own.

In the coming months, the Indianapolis restaurant chain Caplinger’s Fresh Catch Seafood will begin sourcing its second most popular menu item from fish ponds at his 28-acre farm in southern Indiana. The goal is to produce up to half of the 800 to 1,000 pounds of catfish fillets served at the restaurants each week.

“I’ve never done anything like this — I’ve sold dead fish my whole entire life,” he said. “It's tough, and it might be risky. But assuming things go well and these fish grow like they should, we won’t have to look at raising our store prices again for some time.”

It’s a move that could increase local appetite for fish, Caplinger said. But even with fish and seafood consumption on the rise in the U.S., the number of Midwest aquaculture farms is declining, and many fish producers say they face challenges getting their produce to consumers in the region.

Midwestern states compose a fifth of the country’s land but contain about a third of all U.S. farms, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Although experts maintain the region could be a strong aquaculture producer, the number of aquaculture farms in the Midwest has fallen to roughly 271 from 336 a decade ago.

This could be because the region has historically relied on wild-caught seafood, said Amy Shambach, an aquaculture marketing outreach associate with the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant. Seafood produced in the Midwest also must compete with cheaper, imported seafood.

“Our input costs are a little bit higher than other places, and (that) contributes to some of the slow...