(mellow music) - [Bret] There's no question that fishing is a tradition rooted in Minnesota.

It's not only a popular hobby for Minnesotans, but it's also a vital piece of the state's economy.

That's why it's important to fight for our rights as anglers and the reason MN-FISH was born.

(mellow music) - You know, MN-FISH was formed in 2018 with 18 volunteer members.

Really wanted to give anglers a bigger, stronger voice in St. Paul with both the DNR, the governor's office and the legislature.

- A group of really avid anglers saw some issues going on up at the Capitol and interacting with legislators found out that they were having a hard time passing some initiatives to help the DNR on a fisheries front.

And legislators were saying, "You know what?

There's no citizen voice up here helping us."

Legislators are asking, 'cause you have 201 legislators and a lot of them didn't understand or don't understand what is all entailed to behind the scenes around fishing.

And so when they were asking for these dollars and no citizen's voice out there, they were having a hard time doing very basic legislation to promote fishing in Minnesota.

From that spurred the action of Ron Scharra and others to create MN-FISH.

- It was guys like John Peterson from Northland Tackle and Babe Winkelman, myself, Ron Scharra, Craig Wilson.

I mean, I'm not gonna get through everybody 'cause there was 18 of us, but really the commitment was I'm at the later stages of my career, whether I'm in industry or an angler and I wanna give back.

And I can recognize the importance of fishing here and we're not seeing that type of response from others.

And we need to make people more aware of what fishing has, you know, in terms of impact for Minnesota.

Hey, we're a 6.3, $6.4 billion industry in Minnesota when we combine it with boating.

That's as big as Mayo Clinic, that's as big as the pork industry.

We need to have a presence there and make sure that really our impact on the state is recognized by our legislatures and the DNR.

- We, in Minnesota, we sell 1.4 million fishing licenses every year.

And then you add on top of that kid fishing opportunists who don't get a license, it's 25 to 30% of the population is actually out angling at some point throughout a year.

So when you do that number across the legislature, 201 legislators, and only 25 to 30% of 'em have ever fished before in their life, there's a lot of background that you have to provide.

Now, there are a lot of issues inside the angling community that anglers want us to talk about.

We kind of pilot, or is it in the micro side where it's an angler desire on how they want to go fish?

Or is it about improving fishing and taking care of the foundational elements that we need to have there to maintain and improve fishing into the future?

And that's the stuff we're focusing on.

- MN-FISH got involved with a lot of things this past year.

One was urban fishing.

I grew up fishing in Minneapolis, you know, stalking the banks of the Shingle Creek and the Mississippi River.

I have a big place in my heart for urban fishing and we've got some tremendous fishing in the Minneapolis area and other urban areas, but we need to make it clear and make it available to others through docks and fishing areas and things.

So MN-FISH was successful in getting 5 million for that this year.

- It's called FIN, it's the Fishing in the Neighborhood program.

And that program is about engaging with kids largely in the urban core and giving them the opportunity to learn how to tie a hook on a line and go fishing at one of the shore fishing or fishing piers throughout the metropolitan area.

That is a component of what DNR does, but then the stocking of those ponds or those smaller lakes out in those neighborhoods, we see that facility to have the capacity to try to do some of that work there also.

(upbeat music) - [Bret] There's also work being done for Minnesota boaters.

- This last year we were able to get $38 million from the legislature to the boat access system.

We're not asking for new from that money, we're asking for that to be reinvested into and rehab the boat access system in the state.

The DNR is operating approximately 1,700 public boat accesses, lakes and rivers.

There's another 1,700 out there managed by cities or the federal government.

So there's 3,000 of them out there that need constant maintenance.

And what we found is we did a 20 year analysis and realized the legislature fundamentally walked away from the boat access system and stopped any maintenance.

I can't explain why, except there was nobody there besides the DNR asking for those dollars to be reinvested.

- You know, without our voice there's decisions being made that are affecting anglers and affecting our resources, but not necessarily in a good way.

So it's important for anglers to get involved and at least support MN-Fish or get involved yourself to make sure that the perspective of anglers is heard.

- In our proposal at the legislature this year, we're asking for $2 million to start the planning process of a new state hatchery in the metropolitan area that not just feeds the metropolitan area from a stocking perspective, but also provides the DNR the backbone of a research station so that they can do the continuous research that they need to do looking into the future.

And educational opportunities, whether it be for the public or for students at the U who are studying fish and wildlife management, that's the kind of a facility, a backbone facility, that can support all different kinds of things around fishing or fisheries in Minnesota, fisheries management.

- [Bret] Earlier this year we got to visit the St. Paul hatchery and see exactly why MN-FISH is pushing for a replacement facility.

(mellow music) - So this is St. Paul state fish hatchery.

So, at this facility we raise walleye, muskie and tiger muskie.

Last year we did a record 41 million walleye eggs.

- Wow.

- Hatched at this facility.

Three different genetic strains.

There has been a hatchery on these grounds since the late 1800s.

- Wow.

- We're almost pushing about, you know, 150 plus years.

This building is about, you know, kind of pushing 90, 100 years old.

- So you could probably go another 100 or 200 years before you need updates, then?

(Genevieve laughing) - I wish it were so nice.

The way that I tell people about it is we are working with water.

And water, you know, can be a very destructive force, you know, like it's an essential force, you know?

It's essential to all life.

But, you know, if you give water enough time, it'll carve a Grand Canyon.

Basically, the last major renovation to this site was the late '80s.

(mellow music) This structure is called a battery.

And that's what we raise the walleye on.

We'll fill, you know, as many jars as we need to, up to about the two and a half quart line.

It won't be upside down, it'll be right side up.

And then they'll be kind of sitting like this.

And it's actually really fun when the walleye hatch, you kind of, you know, you can get close and you can see them, just the little ones that hatch.

Then they go out the tube and they'll snake their way through this entire structure and they go down another pipe right here and come up into this tank right here.

And this is where we can handle them, net them out, get them into the jugs and disseminate them as needed.

(mellow music) Most fish when they hatch have what's called a yolk sack or an egg sack on their abdomen.

And that's what they're eating, feeding off of for those first few hours, days of life.

And how quickly they absorb that is species dependent and also determines when they need to start feeding themselves.

So for a walleye that is 48 hours from when they hatch to when their yolk sack is fully absorbed and they need to start eating.

This is probably, you know, from like, the '70s or '80s.

We've got a lot of wood on some of these structures, which I am just slowly, you know, whether or not I get a big boost of funding or not, I'm slowly trying to chip away at the wood.

You don't really want wood in a hatchery, because it's a porous material and you've got water going.

There are mold spores just in the air that always exist.

And then from the air they can get into the water and they get that nice porous wood to grow in.

And so we're constantly fighting, you know, a lot of those saprolegnia, other pathogens like that.

These tanks are the tanks we raise the muskie in.

And if you can see at the very bottom they've got those feet and if you look closely, some of the feet are like different height.

- Yeah.

- They're starting to corrode away.

And so we're getting to the point where I am gonna have to go buy some cinder blocks or something just to get a little extra support under there just to make sure that, 'cause if those were to fail, it will happen when there's water in it and there's fish in it.

- [Bret] Weight on there, I suppose- - Would be, yeah, which would be quite tragic.

This is where right after the muskie hatch, they come in here.

The muskie have that yolk sack for seven to 10 days, so a lot longer than the walleye, but while they have that sack, they just lay on their sides on the bottom.

That's it, they don't move.

Once they absorb that yolk sack, that's when they will start swimming.

And we call those swim up fry because now they're like not just laying on the bottom anymore.

And then after that they go into the larger tanks.

(mellow music) And this is also what I was talking about.

This is the other entrance to the hatchery.

(mellow music) So this room is a little bit more multipurpose.

The area crews tend to do a lot of off-season work in here.

That's what a lot of these batteries and the concrete buckets are.

We have another fish battery right here, which we use for walleye as well.

And it kind of has the same setup where the, you know, jars are facing up and when the walleye hatch they go zigzagging through the battery and then up into this tank right here.

This battery right here is where we raise the tiger muskie.

And so the tiger muskie, we don't keep for very long.

Once they're in that swim up phase, we sell 'em to private companies.

And then we actually do buy some back in the fall to stock in some of the lakes in the metro.

- [Bret] What do he private companies do with 'em?

- They're just raising 'em.

(mellow music) Some people don't realize how much easier it is to work with a hatchery that has had a little bit more of like, a recent investment into it.

Hatchery technology has really exploded, even just in like, the past 20 years.

- [Bret] You're saying it's not the same as it was in the 1800s?

- No, sadly it's not.

Actually, you know, in a way it was very much the same probably from the late 1800s until the mid to pushing late 1900s.

There were a lot of things that were the very same.

But with technological advancements, just, you know, basically since the 90s, we could do a lot more with less manpower, essentially.

We could do a lot more monitoring, you know, keeping track of, you know, like, are these fish doing okay?

If something, you know, were to go wrong, which, you know, hopefully never happens, but it certainly can, you can have faster response times.

So you can mitigate losses better with just, you know, kind of bringing the hatchery into the 21st century.

(mellow music) - And if you have a failure, whether your generator goes down or a waterline breaks, you lose an entire year's worth of production out of a facility.

You don't get a chance to reboot that.

You don't get a chance to go someplace else and get that fry.

It's done, that year is over.

And you lose millions of fry opportunity for stocking of that year.

And the system, as resourceful and as resilient as the system is, losing that year class is problematic for us.

- We have a similar situation at our Crystal Springs trout hatchery.

The waterline system is about 100 years old and it is still a lot of clay pipe.

It's imminent failure there is a big concern because those clay pipes could collapse at any time.

And we could not only lose, in that case, trout that we're rearing, but also brood stock trout that we hold, which would take in some cases a decade or more to recover.

- There's a lot of people who work really hard in making sure that this place can do what it can do in a given year.

But, you know, there's also the opportunity for us to be able to do so much more.

Just in general, this building is kind of starting to, you kind of start to feel the age of the building.

You know, there were a lot of concerns when they were upgrading that room over there, making sure that, you know, there weren't besides, you know, things like molds, you know, just other, like, asbestos.

Or, you know, just things like that because this building is so old.

If I had the money and I could just gut it and redo it, it would be the plumbing.

Because if you look out here, you know, you just look at all the pipes, it's a lot.

It's even a lot for me as the hatchery manager.

And we've had times where, because, you know, this building is a little bit older and things have kind of been piecemealed together, something will go wrong and it takes us a while to figure out where that problem point is in the lines, because we've got like, back channels and bypasses and cut acrosses and we're like, "What the heck is going on?"

We are missing out on what I think is one of the most important educational opportunities the DNR has to offer.

I can't really open this place up for tours, because, well, there's several reasons.

It's not designed to have safety in mind.

We kind of have, you know, we have a lot of chemicals here and certainly, the people who work here know how to be safe around those chemicals, but we don't have the accessories, the tools needed to keep those away from visitors.

- [Bret] Sure.

- We also have not a whole lot of space right here.

You know, like this open area right here, this is our biggest space right here.

So I can't really have, you know, like, a large group of people coming through.

You know, it's not also in a way designed for tours because there's, you know, you have to walk across these grates.

So there's always trip hazards.

And, you know, I think one of the most pertinent things is I'm not ADA compliant, you know, in any way.

- [Bret] Okay.

- [Genevieve] You know, the door that we walked through?

- Right.

- Step up.

The other way to get in is down the ramp and then up some like, old metal stairs.

So, you know, I can't really open it up, you know, to the public because I can't serve everyone.

- [Bret] Everyone.

- One of the other hatchery managers, when I was talking to 'em about our needs and stuff, said Wisconsin has better hatcheries than Minnesota.

And I think that should be enough for us to pay all of the money that we need.

(both laughing) - [Bret] Even when Minnesota hatcheries are up to date, there'll be other issues to address regarding our future of fishing.

And that's why anglers need to be heard now and in the future.

- Anglers need to recognize that if we don't stand up and raise our hand, we're not gonna be heard and our goals aren't gonna be met because maybe they just don't know what they are or why they're important for us to pursue.

And so it is important for an organization like MN-FISH, and it's important for anglers to get involved and either support it as a member or financially or both.

- It's not a cheap endeavor.

We need the support.

We need anglers to engage and step in and lend their voice to ours.

I mean, we're not the voice, we're just a voice.

And we're just trying to provide that opportunity and that voice out there.

Whether it's with the DNR, with the legislature, to try to improve phishing as we move forward.

But we need your support and your help to make that happen.

(mellow music)