n THE CARILLON STEINBACH, MAN. C2
n www.thecarillon.com THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2024
RIDGELAND COLONY PHOTO
A walkway down the middle of the barn allows easy access to the tanks at Ridgeland Aqua Farms.
Trout fishing great on Ridgeland Colony
by WES KEATING P eter Waldner goes fishing ev- ery Tuesday, and if you make arrangements ahead of time, you will be able to get a taste of the freshest trout you will ever put in the frying pan. That is, of course, unless you catch it yourself. Waldner, and a staff of five to 10, spend Tuesdays processing the weekly harvest of steelhead trout at the Colony’s “fish farm”, which began in a converted hog barn some 23 years ago, and more recently moved into a new state- of-the-art facility at the Ridgeland Colony, just off Highway 12, six miles north of the Trans-Canada Highway. Peter Waldner is a willing tour guide for the new aqua-farming facility, but because bio-securi- ty comes along with all the bells and whistles, visitors get a birds’ eye view of operation from behind the glass of a second-level viewing room. Aqua-farming is nothing new for the Ridgeland Colony and it was more than two decades ago that fish were added to a long list of agricultural enterprises, which included dairy, pigs, poultry lay- ers and honey bees. There is also Ridgeland Manufacturing, which today uses laser cutting and weld- ing, to create a variety of parts for agricultural equipment. Innovation and diversity are the order of the day at Ridgeland and the next enterprise being consid- ered, according to Peter Waldner, will be the processing of fish by- products by composting heads and bones left behind when the steelhead trout are filleted for market. Now that their new barn is in operation, there will be a lot more fish heads and bones for that com- post pile. The new facility has in- creased production capacity from 60 tonnes to 200 tonnes of trout annually, Waldner says. The new barn is three times the size of the old one. Ridgeland did the concrete work and metal work, and brought in a lot of the equipment from Spain and Denmark, to complete the new facility. There are six tanks 12 metres in diameter and three metres deep, and another dozen larger tanks measuring 26 metres wide and three metres deep, which run the full length of the barn. This impressive array of tanks is connected with an equally impres- sive system of automatic feeding equipment, oxygenators, “ozone- ators”, bio-filters and a maze of water recycling pipes, to create the perfect growing conditions for this hungry species of trout.
WES KEATING THE CARILLON With the latest state-of-the-art equipment in the new barn, Peter Waldner is able to run the aqua farm by himself, bringing in extra staff on processing day.
system completes this most effi- cient way of raising fish in a con- trolled environment. Solids are removed from the tanks with drum filters and bio-fil- ters, with thousands of tiny plas- tic discs, where good bacteria re- moves ammonia from the liquid before it is pumped back through
two months. Waldner points out that these pellets are custom-manufactured for the different growth stages of the trout and range in size from a powder-like substance for the ti- niest of fingerlings, to 5mm pellets for nearly fully grown fish. An overhead water circulation
And trout do have healthy appe- tites, and these healthy appetites require quite the feeding regimen. One hundred and sixty tonnes of fish meal is shipped in from Sur- rey, BC every year, Waldner ex- plains. Six semi-loads of shrimp meal pellets, each carrying 26 tonnes, arrive at Ridgeland every
the system and returns to the tanks from overhead ducts, with a controlled amount of ozone and oxygen added through tubes from the monitoring equipment.
See ‘Filling Manitoba’s trout market’ on 3C
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