Link to the Show / Show NotesTravelers whizzing past Southern Idaho’s sagebrush desert on I-84 are likely thinking about anything but caviar. Rattlesnakes, lava rocks and the next restroom, sure. But not glistening black beads of high-end sturgeon roe. And yet, just to the south of the highway, often hidden below the rim of the Snake River Canyon, flows its namesake river, home to one of the world’s oldest living species of vertebrates and one of America’s newest forms of aquaculture: sturgeon. With fossil records dating back 150 million years, these giant fish are native to the Snake River, but sturgeon farming along its shores is only about 10 years old. In that short time, though, Idaho has become one of America’s major caviar producers. “There’s some of the big mammas ready for caviar,” says Leo Ray. Ray, an Idaho sturgeon farming pioneer, points just past his shoes as a huge sturgeon silently swims down one of several, 100-foot-long concrete raceways at Fish Processors of Idaho, his fish farm near Hagerman. With spring water, geothermal resources and close proximity to the Snake River, the Hagerman Valley is Idaho’s fish-farming epicenter, and Ray has farmed species like trout, tilapia and catfish here for decades. Sturgeon is a [...]
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