April 6, 2009

EXCLUSIVE

Fish Tale: Davis Fish Farm a thriving local business

By Scott Wright

Halfway between Centre and Jacksonville, in a quiet, rural corner of Cherokee County, acres of hilly, timber-laden land that might seem better suited for raising raccoons or rattlesnakes is home to an equally unique type of farm. To get there requires traversing an old dirt road, maneuvering around a few mud holes and squeezing past a rusted, metal gate.

In an old cattle pasture surrounded by distant hills, a few strands of barbed wire and an unnamed creek, several dozen ponds sit quietly. The man-made holes are filled to overflowing with catfish, crappie, bream and bass. Somehow, it seems odd that Weiss Lake is several miles away.

Bill Davis and his sons have spent the last two decades growing and selling fish of just about every variety. Over the years, they've sold thousands of pounds of fish to more customers than they can count.

“We've been doing it for 20 years,” Dain Davis says as he looks out over a checkerboard of fish ponds stretching for hundreds of yards. “ We've got 20 ponds here and another 12 at the house.”

Davis says he and his younger brother Daniel started helping their father at the farm as soon as they were able, and have been hard at it ever since.

“It's a family business, all the way,” Davis says. “It's me, Daniel, Dad and one other guy right now. Mom is the secretary.”

In the early days the Davis Fish Farm dealt mostly in catfish, which typically ended up in food processing plants and, eventually, restaurants. But these days, the ponds in Ball Play are mostly filled with the kind of fish that end up mounted instead of grilled or fried.

“We started out with just catfish fingerlings,” Davis says. “Then it turned to sport fish and we started stocking fewer and fewer catfish. We still stock a lot of catfish, but nothing like we used to.”

These days, bass, bluegill, and crappie are the type of fish that private lake and pond owners are eager to buy by the truckload.

“F-1s, those are first-generation hybrid bass,” Davis explains. “They are a cross between Florida bass, which get big, and northern bass, which are very aggressive. What you end up with is a big fish that is a lot of fun to catch, so we sell a lot of those.”

Davis says another popular type of fish the ponds currently stock is the copper nose bluegill.

“That's a Florida strand of bluegill,” he says. “They get bigger and take the feed really well. We also stock a lot of red ear shellcracker, threadfin shad, fathead minnows, and catfish in a bunch of different sizes.”

Davis says the fish are typically kept in separate ponds as they grow. That way, when he and his brother “pull the ponds,” they know what kind of fish they're getting.

Using bluegill and bass as an example, Davis explains the procedure for raising fish, from start to finish.

“We start with 1,000-2,000 copper nose bluegill per acre, and we like to put them in a new pond in the wintertime, although you can put them in anytime,” Davis says. “We let them spawn several times. We can put fathead minnows in with them, which will take some of the pressure off the bluegill when the bass are put in.”

Come summertime, the bass are added to the mix on a 10-to-1 ratio.

“What you're after is, within a year, being able to take a certain percentage of bass out, every year, to keep the pond in balance,” he says. “You want plenty of bluegill in there to help the bass to grow. They're in there for the bass to eat, but also to fish out and eat.”

Davis says a well-balanced pond that is properly maintained supplies a never-ending stream of whatever type of fish it contains.

“Every pond is different, but with bass, for example, you want to be able to take 20-30 lbs. of fish per year out of every pond,” he says.

At harvest time, a tractor tows a 700-foot hydraulic-fed net around the pond. Then, it's just a matter of reeling 'em all in.

“You basically make a big horseshoe around three sides of the pond, and then slowly bring them in,” Davis says. “How long it takes depends on the size of the pond. And when we pull them in, we want to keep them in the water as much as possible and try not to scratch them up as we're taking them out.”

After the fish are pulled and placed in holding tanks, they are ready for transport to customers across the Southeast.

“We grade them if we need to, into various sizes,” Davis says. “And we've got everything from a 400-gallon truck to a 1,200-gallon truck that we use to make deliveries. We do it all ourselves.”

The slowdown in the economy has affected business, but Davis says he doesn't expect a long-term decline in the need for the products and services the family business offers.

“Last year January was our biggest month, and this year it was probably our slowest,” he says. “But business varies from month to month. Springtime is a busy time, and we just seem to keep growing every year.”