NEW PARIS, Ohio — The fish swimming around in a tank are an eye-catcher for Garland Markley’s booth at the Oxford Farmers Market. Customers choose their fish and Markley, with assistance from his family, cleans and packages it.

 

Ray Arlinghaus likes to be first in line for the trout. “The fish are delicious, and trout is a favorite of ours; it’s as fresh as you can get,” he explained. “The fish are sustainable, produced in a healthy environment and handled humanely.”

Markley raises the fish in floating baskets in a five-acre lake. Besides the trout, the family raises catfish, hybrid striped and largemouth bass, bluegill and tilapia.

He orders the hybrid striped bass and catfish in the spring as 4-inch fingerlings  and keeps them for two growing seasons– after that first summer they overwinter in the pond, and by the middle to end of the following summer, they are market- sized at an average of 1.5 pounds.

The trout are a different story. “I have a limited growing season for trout,” Markley said. “They won’t survive through the summer. I get them as 8- to 10-inch fish in the fall. I put them in cages, and raise them through the winter.”

Tilapia are just the reverse. They thrive throughout the summer, but won’t make it through the winter months in an outdoor pond. Markley also vends to Jungle Jim’s International Market and other retail stores and sells some pond stockers.

He would like to expand the business, but is limited by the lack of electrical power at the pond. The fish cages are made of PVC-coated steel with floats attached and are moored to a dock. Natural flow moves the water moves through the cages.

“In a farm in a cage culture, you figure your cubic feet, and each cubic foot is 7.5 gallons of water,” Markley noted. “You figure one pound of fish for every gallon of water as long as you have a good natural flow. The wisdom says I could grow 5,000 pounds of fish for every acre, so in a five-acre pond that would be 25,000 pounds,” he said. “I would have to have some kind of mechanical aeration to keep the water flowing through those cages. Without any aeration, you’re really working off of a one-acre area.” 

 

Markley went into aquaculture because he wanted to be able to spend more time with his growing family. He hopes to make it a full-time business, but currently he also works full-time in his father’s business, Aaron Markley Excavator, LLC.

While he understands the need for regulations, they also make expansion difficult.

Moving the fish across state lines is a problem because of regulations; New Paris is near the Indiana border with Ohio. “Regulations don’t always make sense,” he explained. “They ask you to have Viral Hemorrhagic Septicemia (VHS) testing on tilapia, and science is showing that tilapia can’t have VHS. You have to pay somebody to do your VHS testing even though tilapia can’t get it.”

Despite the difficulties, the Markley clan is happy to meet their customers at the market on Saturday mornings. And Market  Manager Larry Slocum is glad to see them. “Garland has been selling here for several years,” Slocum said. “He has been building a clientele every year he has been here because his product is fresh. He and is family are such a positive influence on the market, with their smiles and their energy, and their fish just reflects that.”