URUGUAY-FISH FARMING FOR TOP END OF MARKET.
A South American country known for its beef and beaches is now exporting caviar.
These high-class fish eggs are being produced at a sturgeon farm along the banks of the Río Negro in central Uruguay by a family-owned company, Esturiones del Río Negro (Black River Sturgeons).
’’Russian experts did a satellite study showing that our location is one of the few places in the world best suited to raise sturgeon,’’ said Javier Alcalde, a member of the family firm that built and operates the farm.
So the family, which also has a marine supply business, worked with Russian sturgeon and caviar experts to develop a fish farm near Baygorria, Uruguay, which channels water from the Río Negro. In 1995, the fish farm imported 300,000 fertilized osetra sturgeon eggs from Rus
’’We’re the only osetra sturgeon farm in the Southern Hemisphere,’’ Alcalde said.
Osetra is one of the three main types of caviar-producing sturgeon. The others are beluga, considered the rarest, and sevruga.
The eggs hatched in Uruguay and the osetra sturgeon fry adapted well to the South American environment. By 2000, the farm had produced its first caviar harvest, which weighed in at about 110 pounds. Female sturgeons generally require about 6 to 7 years to mature, Alcalde said, and to begin producing eggs.
Esturiones del Río Negro now has about 250,000 to 300,000 sturgeons, 40 employees (including two specialists from Russia) and expects to produce four tons of caviar in 2009, double last year’s harvest, Alcalde said.
The company, which has invested about $15 million in the project since 1992, could expand annual production to as much as 10 tons in several years, but is cautious about growing too fast.
’’We could expand more quickly, and produce more caviar,’’ Alcalde said. ``But we’re a family-owned company and we pay attention to quality and to keeping the environment in balance. We don’t produce to meet orders. We harvest when the eggs reach the best level of flavor and firmness.’’
Estimates on the size of the international caviar market vary. Most of the world’s caviar comes from the Caspian Sea, and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species set an overall quota of about 84 tons on caviar exported by Russia, Iran and three neighboring Caspian exporters for the year that ended last month. Most species of sturgeon in the region are endangered.
The world caviar market is also supplied by illegal sturgeon fishing in the region, legal caviar production from fish farms in several countries and other sources.
Meanwhile, employees at Esturiones del Río Negro keep a close watch over the developing fish, identifying the larger females with chips and other tags. In a natural setting like the Caspian, caviar fishermen harvest large numbers of sturgeon at one time, taking different sizes and obtaining eggs at varying levels of maturity and quality.
By tracking their development, the Uruguayan farm can choose females that have reached the optimum level of egg production and harvest about 50 fish per day. The females are killed to remove the eggs.
While the Uruguayan farm raises both male and female sturgeons, most of the males are culled out and their meat sold. When eggs hatch, about 50 percent are male and 50 percent female.
Fish farms typically produce pollution from fish waste and uneaten food, but Esturiones del Río Negro was built to use gravity, the natural flow of the river and waterfalls to clean the water it uses naturally.
