Tropical tilapia grown in Minnesota

No-Guilt Fish

Fish seems to come in two varieties these days: nearly extinct and terrifyingly toxic. Is there any hope for a good-hearted fish-and-seafood lover? Actually, lots.

BY DARA MOSKOWITZ GRUMDAHL, Minnesota Monthly

Do you know where all the live tilapia for the Hong Kong expat community in Vancouver comes from? Renville, Minnesota—a little town off Highway 212 about halfway between Shakopee and South Dakota, in sugar-beet country. And pretty much all the live tilapia in Toronto and Calgary comes out of Renville, too—hundreds of thousands of pounds of fish. “We ship them in water that stays warm all the way to Vancouver, though there’s only a certain amount of time before the quality of the water changes for fish respiration,” Mel Stocks, one of the founders of MinAqua, the outfit that raises the tilapia, told me. “So we send two drivers.”

MinAqua is actually a co-operative. It’s owned by more than 300 farmers, mostly sugar-beet farmers, who were looking for a way to use the excess heat generated by their beet-processing plant. They figured out they could use that heat as a way to warm ponds, and the rest of it was easy: Tilapia are vegetarians, so the Renville farmers could raise the feed themselves, and the waste the fish generate is a lot cleaner than, say, hog waste, so they use it to fertilize their fields. That’s how a bunch of Minnesota sugar-beet farmers became major tilapia producers—super-green ones at that.

(Continued here.)