This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 22, 2012 - OSAGE BEACH, Mo. -- Missourians may be familiar with the paddlefish (it is their state’s official aquatic animal, after all), but not many know that the bizarre-looking creature was behind Missouri’s once thriving caviar industry.
Caviar producers in Missouri once exported thousands of pounds of the delicacy, largely to buyers in Japan, China, the European Union and other countries. In recent years, though, production has been dwindling, and it may be on the brink of disappearing altogether, doling an economic hit to the state.
High hopes
A new program out of Oklahoma is putting businesses like l’Osage Caviar under pressure. L’Osage is run by Steve Kahrs and is a subsidiary of his family’s company, Osage Catfisheries.
“It’s taken a long time to get where we’re at right now,” Kahrs said.
Kahrs’ late father Jim established Osage Catfisheries in 1953, but the family only started raising paddlefish for caviar in 1981 after international headlines about declining sturgeon populations in the Caspian Sea (traditionally, world caviar supplies came from Iran and the Soviet Union/Russia).
The Kahrs’ caviar sales did quite well for a number of years, at its peak selling thousands of pounds each year. The family even had aspirations to reach a ton once most of the fish reached maturity.
But something changed in 2008, and sales have been plummeting ever since. Last year, Kahrs’ company barely sold 100 pounds of paddlefish caviar.
Not only did the Great Recession hit, but that year the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation (the state’s equivalent of the Missouri Department of Conservation) made its way into the caviar industry by establishing a new program to manage the paddlefish population, funded by caviar sales.
“It gets to the point to where it’s almost impossible for us to harvest the fish, process the fish, package the caviar and pay back the lakeholders where the fish are at, at the price [Oklahoma is] setting,” Kahrs said.
The average female paddlefish takes 10 to 12 years before it can be harvested for its eggs, so many of the fish in the program are just now reaching maturity, and the landowners whose lakes are stocked with the Kahrs’ paddlefish are expecting a return.
But Oklahoma’s program may keep that money out of the state completely.
From across the state line
Here’s how the program works: Oklahoma anglers with paddlefish permits can bring their catch, or have it picked up and taken to the program’s processing center, run by the Department of Wildlife Conservation. There, anglers report data on the fish -- where it was caught, how large it is, etc. -- and in exchange get their catch cleaned and the meat packaged and returned to them for free. If the fish has eggs, the department harvests and keeps the roe (raw fish eggs) to be turned into caviar to sell on the market. The revenue from those sales goes back to support the department’s paddlefish conservation efforts.
Oklahoma is able to sell the caviar at a low price because they do not front the production costs that private businessman like Kahrs have. Since recreational anglers in Oklahoma have an incentive to give their fish to the department, it generally does not have to pay for the costs of raising, harvesting or catching the fish.
“You’ve got a government agency competing directly against a private industry,” Kahrs said. “And they’re not having to go through a lot of the expense that we are with initially growing the fish, growing them up to the right size before they’re stocked into the ranching program, the 10 to 12 years that we have to wait for a return off that product. There’s just no way that we can compete.”
Brent Gordon of the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation said Oklahoma’s program was never intended to compete with Missouri producers or to put them out of business.
“I am not aware of that -- that we have hurt the price of caviar for them at all. I haven’t seen anything to tell me that,” he said. “Our philosophy from the beginning of this is that the caviar is a byproduct. Without the fish being managed properly, there isn’t going to be any caviar.”
L’Osage caviar retails at about $45 an ounce -- or $720 a pound. Oklahoma can sell the same product at nearly a fifth of that cost.
Last year, the program sold approximately 15,000 pounds of high-grade paddlefish caviar at a wholesale price of $135 a pound -- or about $9 an ounce, netting around $2 million.
“People don’t know quite how expensive managing paddlefish is as far as law enforcement needs and things like that. We have plenty to do that now,” Gordon said. “After that’s over, there’s not much [money] left.”
Wider implications
The Kahrs family aren’t the only caviar producers struggling to adapt to this new market. Cliff and Kathy Rost started Show-Me Caviar in 2002 and run a fishouse out of Morrison, a town just shy of 150 people, west of Hermann along the Missouri River.
“Oklahoma is setting our market; they are directly affecting our business,” Cliff said.
Last year, all caviar producers in Missouri collectively sold only 400 pounds of paddlefish caviar, he said.
The Missouri Aquaculture Association (founded by Jim Kahrs) lists only three Missouri caviar producers as members -- including Osage Catfisheries and Show-Me Caviar. The third, Callaway’s Caviar, is based out of Jefferson City.
The Rosts said they have felt the effect of Oklahoma’s program on their business since it started, and unless something changes, the future of Missouri caviar looks bleak.
“We have to pay our own bill,” Cliff said. “And when you get a product so cheap, there’s just no money in it.”
He said international buyers have been increasingly buying caviar from Oklahoma, but that the state program has been trying to get a hand on Missouri’s own market as well.
That won’t be the case for one local retailer -- Connie Cunningham. Cunningham, also of Morrison, runs the state’s only free-range goose farm: Sassafras Valley Farm. Cunningham sells the Rosts’ caviar under the label of Gasconade Caviar, and she said it is a big part of her business.
Losing Missouricaviar “would affect us greatly,” she said.
Cunningham’s largest market for her geese is around the holidays. A “Christmas goose” is a European tradition, and it is usually complemented by caviar. She said new buyers and “foodies” are often astonished to learn about Missouri caviar and are eager to try it. She has sold the unique dish to buyers as far away as Hawaii.
“It’s important that we have things like [Missouri caviar],” Cunningham said. “I would hate to ever lose things like that.”
Not only would it be a cultural loss, but it would be an economic one, as well. Cunningham said the caviar brings about $4,000 a year into her small business, and losing the product would mean an economic hit for the area.
“We have a big impact on the local economy. It’s a domino effect,” she said.
In the name of conservation?
Missouri producers are also left wondering how Oklahoma’s production is affecting that state’s wild paddlefish.
“There is no logical reason why they need to produce that much caviar in the name of research,” Kathy Rost said.
“We believe that they are overproducing caviar,” Cliff added.
Gordon defends the program, saying it ultimately helps the state to gauge better how much fish can be caught each year, and that it keeps biologists like himself from having to kill paddlefish solely for research, since those fish processed would have been caught and killed by anglers anyway.
“You just can’t go out and slaughter the number of specimens you would need to make your data statistically valid,” he said.
Gordon added that early data from the program indicated that Oklahoma anglers were over-harvesting paddlefish, leading the department to cut down dramatically on the number of fish it took in.
Last year, it took in approximately 4,000 fish, Gordon said, down from 8,000 in the program’s early years.
“I get that most people do not understand fisheries management and statistics and all the data we have, and it does appear to be an overkill,” Gordon said. “But I promise you, I sleep a lot better at night knowing my data are as sound as this.”
Gordon said the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is “in tune” with his state’s program and holds it as an example of effective, self-sustaining fishery management.
“Every fish biologist dreams about having as much data as I have,” he said.
But that’s exactly what Kahrs, the Rosts and Missouri’s producers are afraid of: that Missouri, seeing Oklahoma’s success, will implement a similar program and hurt their businesses even more.
Trish Yasger, a fisheries biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation, said Missouri is nowhere near, or even thinking about implementing a similar program, since the two state’s paddlefish populations are so different.
“We have no plans to do anything like Oklahoma. We’re set up on such a wide scale, it’s not even possible to do that,” she said. “There has been no talk about that.”
Oklahoma’s program operates mostly in the northeast region of the state.
Paddlefish, a threatened species, are found in states along the Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio River valleys, and population in these states varies. Harvesting paddlefish caviar is illegal in some states, such as Iowa and Kansas.
While the future of Missouri’s caviar is still up in the air, producers are bracing for an impact. Gordon said his department has approximately 6,000 pounds of excess caviar from last year’s season left to sell and plans to release it sometime next month. The price has not been set, leaving Missouri producers holding their breath.
“I know right now that we have the possibility of sending quite a large amount of caviar into Japan, but right now our Japanese customer is waiting on Oklahoma to release their caviar and set the price,” Kahrs said.
“It’s sad whenever you’re talking with companies, and that’s all everyone is waiting on: what’s Oklahoma going to do. They are the producers,” Rost said. “They’re basically killing the market.”
Ryan Schuessler, a former summer intern at the Beacon, is a student of journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Nina Buckhalter and Megan Rentschler contributed to this report.